The objective of the present paper is to describe students' self-regulation while working on their senior capstone design projects. The specific focus of this study was to understand how students manage their projects with their teammates on three major issues: Team Management, Resources Management and Time Management. Quantitative data associated with student SelfRegulated Learning (SRL) on project management were collected using our Engineering Design Metacognitive Questionnaire (EDMQ) survey instrument. Three hundred and fourteen students participated in the study. Data collected were evaluated quantitatively by comparing the mean value of each item from the same project-management-related issues (i.e., teamwork, time, and resources) across SRL episodes (i.e., task interpretation, planning strategies, cognitive strategies, and monitoring and fix-up strategies). The findings suggest Team strategies require a high level of student involvement and effort, while time strategies and resource management strategies are employed to a lesser degree, on average. Small differences were seen between male and female students in average strategy expression. Students may be benefitted by interventions designed to improve self-regulation for specific team management strategies employed by engineering students in relation to project management activities. Needed improvements touching on various strategic actions, as well as monitoring and fix-up strategies, are described in this paper.
Xie, T. (2015). A world of information at their fingertips: College students' motivations and practices in their self-determined information seeking.
AbstractPeople frequently engage in the process of "heutagogy" (i.e., self-determined learning). Unlike pedagogy and andragogy, heutagogy occurs without a structure or leader setting the context and directing the learning toward a specific goal. The lack of structure and the possible self-determination of topic, value, source, and trust in information led us to wonder about the motivations, goals, and processes considered by college students as they engage in self-determined learning. We conducted a survey with 83 American college students regarding their information-seeking preferences and behaviors. Some students reported accessing different media depending on what information they were seeking, while others sought multiple forms of information from the same media. Family and community influenced their trust in media, yet they also recognized experts and data as important justifications for credibility of media. We exposed some relationships among personal characteristics, perceptions of information, and self-determined learning activities. We conclude with implications and directions for future research.
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