First-year Students’ Self-regulation Process through Self-report at a Minority Serving Institution (MSI)

Abstract

First-year college students face a difficult task of self-regulating in a formal academic environment, especially those lacking the fundamental skills to do so. The purpose of this study is to assess the self-regulated processes of first-year students at a Minority Serving Institution, or MSI. Participants consisted of 822 freshmen (519 females; 303 males) enrolled in an orientation course at a Minority Serving Institution in the United States. Collection of data included using the Self-Regulation Questionnaire designed to assess self-regulatory processes through self-report. The questionnaire was administered through Taskstream system and analyzed through version SPSS 23 for continued analysis of data. The data were analyzed using a regression analysis to determine whether correlations existed within or between variables. The self-regulation score was calculated by totaling all the items. Analysis of data from this study indicated that females (r = -.12, p<.001) and transfer students (r = .14, p<.001) had significantly higher SRQ scores. The data also revealed that for self-regulation, more transfer students (41.5%) placed in the high (intact) category than did non-transfer students (24.7%). A stepwise regression model predicting the SRQ total score were based on six candidate demographic variables. The final two variable model was significant (p = .001) and accounted for 3.2% of the variance in the SRQ total score. Specifically, SRQ total scores were higher for transfer students (β = .13, p = .001) and for females (β = -.11, p = .001). Among 822 participants, 306 fell into the low self-regulation range; 293 were in the mid-level self-regulation range; and 223 ranked in the high self-regulation range. Results stemming from the dataset revealed that thirty-seven percent of first-year students have low self-regulatory scores. Nearly 50% of the male students were less favorable to self-regulate than female students during their experience in post-secondary education.