Exploring relations among college students' prior knowledge, implicit theories of intelligence, and self-regulated learning in a hypermedia environment

Researchers and educators continue to explore how to assist students in the acquisition of conceptual understanding of complex science topics. While hypermedia learning environments (HLEs) afford unique opportunities to display multiple representations of these often abstract topics, students who do not engage in self-regulated learning (SRL) with HLEs often fail to achieve conceptual understanding. There is a lack of research regarding how student characteristics, such as prior knowledge and students’ implicit theory of intelligence (ITI), interact with SRL to influence academic performance. In this study, structural equation modeling was used to investigate these issues. It was found that prior knowledge and ITI were related to SRL and performance, and that SRL acted as a benevolent moderator, enhancing the positive effects of prior knowledge upon learning, and diminishing the negative effects of having amaladaptive ITI. ! 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. In the United States and around the world, advancement through scientific understanding has been one of the primary engines of economic development (National Academy of Sciences, 2007). Yet students in the United States continue to struggle with even basic understanding in science, as evidenced by an overall decrease in average student performance on the science portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 1996 and 2005 (Grigg, Lauko, & Brockway, 2006). Deep conceptual understanding in science, which includes declarative as well as procedural knowledge of complex systems (Schraw, 2006), is even less common among U.S. students. A preponderance of evidence supports the claim that, particularly in science domains, complex systems (e.g., the circulatory system) are difficult for students to learn (Chi, 2005; Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo, 2006). Yet this conceptual understanding is necessary if students are to be able to apply and transfer their knowledge to real world problems (Roth, 1990). Researchers and educators have studied whether hypermedia learning environments (HLEs) might be used to foster conceptual understanding in science (Azevedo, 2005; Jacobson, 2008). While the multiple representations afforded by HLEs can help students acquire sophisticated understanding (Lajoie & Azevedo, 2006), they are most effective when students are able to self-regulate their learning (Azevedo, 2005; Azevedo & Jacobson, 2008; Shapiro, 2008; Shapiro & Niederhauser, 2004; White & Frederiksen, 2005). Models of selfregulated learning (Pintrich, 2000; SRL;Winne &Hadwin,1998; Zimmerman, 2000, 2001) highlight that successful students actively engage in planning, monitoring, and assessing the efficacy of the strategies and operations they use to acquire knowledge, and that these students have adaptive self-beliefs that foster their use of SRL processes. There is ample research showing a direct relation between the quality of student self-regulation and academic outcomes (cf. Azevedo & Cromley, 2004; Greene & Azevedo, 2007a). However, more empirical research is needed regarding the role of student characteristics, such as self-beliefs and prior knowledge, in SRL (Muis, 2007; Pintrich, 2002; Winne, 2005). Winne and Hadwin (1998) posit that the more students self-regulate, the more opportunities there are for their self-beliefs to have direct effects upon both the number and kinds of learning processes students enact. Importantly, more frequent, high-quality self-regulation is also posited to influence the quality of the standards these students strive to meet when learning, thus suggesting that SRL processes can moderate the effects of student characteristics, such as self-beliefs, upon the learning process. An influential self-belief that has received little attention in SRL research is a student’s implicit theory of intelligence (ITI; Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Dweck and Master (2008) argue that an adaptive ITI encourages SRL, whereas a maladaptive implicit theory discourages regulation, but it is unclear whether the effects of ITI on learning are moderated by SRL processing. Another student characteristic, prior * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 919 843 5550 (office); fax: þ1 919 843 2614. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J.A. Greene), [email protected] (L.-J. Costa), [email protected] (J. Robertson), [email protected] (Y. Pan), vdeek@ yahoo.com (V.M. Deekens).