Sixth-grade students' self-regulated learning and motivation in a technology-enhanced personalized learning environment: A case study

Students’ self-regulation and motivation may be sustained or disrupted depending on the learning environment. Research has shown beginning in sixth grade, students experience an initial drop in academic self-efficacy and motivation. This study seeks to investigate the lived experiences of 6th grade students within a school in its second year of implementing a technology-enhanced personalized program. Based on the research, this study asked: How do sixth-grade students engage in SRL based on Pintrich’s model of SRL in a technology-enhanced, blended personalized-learning environment? The following sub-questions were posed: How do students engage in SRL during the forethought, performance, and reflections phases of task completion? How do students engage in motivational-strategy use when completing tasks? To investigate these questions, a qualitative case study of sixth- grade students’ self-regulation and motivational strategy use within a technology-enhanced, personalized learning program was used. Multiple sources of data were collected from two classrooms including classroom observations, interviews, documents, student artifacts, online artifacts from the learning platform, and mentor meeting observations. This study found that students engaged in strategy use across all three phases of task performance to varying degrees and in slightly different ways. Participants across both cases used strategies to self-regulate their learning or remain motivated, but there was evidence that strategy use occurred with external support from teachers, peers, parents, or prompts within the online Summit platform. Findings in this study implicate strong connections among the teacher, curriculum, and overall learning environment to student strategy use. Further research is needed to investigate the interplay among the physical and online learning environment, mentoring, and students’ self-regulated learning and motivational strategy use.