First Advisor

Phillips, Michael M.

Document Type

Dissertation

Date Created

11-2019

Embargo Date

6-13-2019

Abstract

As students enter the university environment, they are presented with various commitments that may or may not impede academic performance. With the issues of student attrition and retention, there is a need to provide further tools for students to use to monitor their performance. As students’ progress to higher level coursework, expectations and time commitments increase, and self-regulation of learning becomes even more important. Researchers may be able to deliver information to help students with self-regulation of learning by leveraging new affordances in technology in students’ daily lives. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the feasibility and associated findings of an ecological momentary intervention surrounding self-regulation, motivation and study strategy utilization. This quasi-experimental study had 49 participants. The overarching project for this dissertation was a two-week intensive longitudinal design with a baseline appointment. For the in the moment assessment via a smartphone application, there were two conditions: an intervention and an assessment-only group. This dissertation includes two manuscripts. The first manuscript examines methodological issues related to the feasibility of using multiple types of prompting (user-initiated and researcher-generated) when utilizing in the moment data collection in an educational context, specifically factors that may influence participants’ response rates and compliance to the researcher protocol. The second manuscript examines motivational and emotional differences of the same participants within a self-regulation intervention delivered in the moment via ecological momentary intervention. Specifically, I investigated motivational and emotional factors related to student behavior (as measured by reports of studying) during the monitoring time period. In the feasibility paper, I found overall that participants responded to approximately two prompts a day and that baseline factors such as lower self-control were associated with greater missing data. I also found discrepancies between responses to in-the-same-moment study related questions (i.e., participants saying they had not studied while also reporting a subsequent amount of time spent studying), which informed which outcomes to use in the content-based manuscript. In the content manuscript, I found no condition differences between the intervention and assessment-only groups in regard to the number of user-initiated study sessions, indicating a lack of compliance to the intervention protocol. I found that academic motivation and anxiety over time were associated with the probability of reporting studying. Finally, I found moderate relationships for end of day reports of study times with the in the moment reports, suggesting a potential rounding bias. Based upon the results, it appears there were issues with fidelity of implementation within the protocol. This could be due to the burden placed upon participants for in the moment data collection, or additional circumstances not measured within the study. In regard to lower response rates, participant compensation could have played a role due to the data collection burden. With the majority of data collection taking place during the latter part of the semester, the time of the study may have contributed to lower instances of studying as participants for various reasons (e.g., fewer assessments, already established study practices).There needs to be further refinement to the intervention protocol to be able to measure studying in the moment including direct reminders to participants about their study behaviors and ways to further develop the training protocol for initiating prompts. Additionally, waves of data collection across the course of the semester will be explored in future work.

Extent

161 pages

Local Identifiers

Duck_unco_0161D_10793.pdf

Rights Statement

Copyright is held by the author.

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