APSY4233 · Education

Motivation, Emotion, and Self-Regulated Learning

Lynch School of Education & Human Development

Self-regulated learning is a process that involves setting learning and academic goals, monitoring your progress toward these goals, and making adjustments when you realize that you are not on track to be successful. The course will primarily focus on the ways that motivation and emotion contribute to this process. For example, students will examine the motivations that lead individuals to adopt particular achievement goals (e.g., the goal of getting a good grade), the ways in which these goals impact learners behaviors, and the impact of these behaviors on important outcomes (e.g., grades and well-being). Students in the course will also examine different types of emotions (e.g.,curiosity, boredom, frustration, etc.) that learners experience when pursuing their academic goals and the ways in which these emotions can support or hinder their achievement of these goals. In addition to examining motivation and emotion as factors shape learners' achievement and self-regulation, the course will explore some of the ways in which motivation and emotion can themselves be regulated. For example, students will learn about the kinds of strategies that individuals use to bolster their motivation when they feel like quitting or to calm themselves down when they are feeling anxious. Although the course will explore some of the ways that motivation, emotion, and self-regulation develop, its main focus will be on how adolescents and young adults pursue their learning goals. This course is offered at the undergraduate level and graduate level. The differentiated assessment for graduate students is as follows:The primary forms of assessment for undergraduates are (a) class discussion and in-class reflection activities (15%), (b) quizzes and exams (45%), and (40%) a class project. The master's students would be responsible for completing the same reflection activities, quizzes, and exams as the undergrads, but would complete their class project on a different topic. The undergraduate students are asked to keep a weekly project journal in which they reflect on the challenges they face while working toward a goal that they set for themselves at the beginning of the semester. Towards the end of the semester, they are required to write a paper in which they reflect on two challenges they faced and the strategies they used to try to overcome them. They are supposed to use the concepts and theories from the course to assess the effectiveness of their strategies (see pp. 5-7 of the attached syllabus). In contrast, the master's students would be asked to describe a learning environment that they would be interested in designing or refining (this could be an environment that they are developing for another course). In their weekly project journal, they would be asked to reflect on how the concepts/theories that they learned about that week can inform some aspect of their learning environment's design. Then, for their final papers, they would have to integrate the ideas from their project journal into a coherent proposal. The overarching aim of the proposal would be to maximize learners' engagement and self-regulation within the learning environment that they are designing.APSY4233 was formerly APSY3233