Academic goals and learning quality in higher education students.

In this paper, the relations between academic goals and various indicators that define the quality of the learning process are analyzed. The purpose was to determine to what extent high, moderate, or low levels of academic goals were positively or negatively related to effort regulation, the value assigned to academic tasks, meta-cognitive self-regulation, self-efficacy, beliefs about learning control, and management of time and study environment. The investigation was carried out with a sample of 632 university students (70% female and 30% male) and mean age of 21.22 (SD=2.2).The results show that learning goals, or task orientation, are positively related to all the indictors of learning quality considered herein. Although for other kinds of goals-work-avoidance goals, performance-approach goals, and performance-avoidance goals-significant relations were not found with all the indicators, there was a similar tendency of significant results in all cases; the higher the levels of these goals, the lower the levels of the indicators of learning quality.

Self-regulated profiles and academic achievement.

To date, research on the relation between learning self-regulation and academic achievement has generally show disparate results. This work intends to look into this relation from a new perspective, which consists in classifying the students as more or less self-regulated depending on diverse indicators and using cluster analysis. The aim of this work was to identify the possible self-regulated learning profiles in a sample of university students. By means of stepwise linear regression analysis, we determined which of the selected variables better predicted metacognitive self-regulation. Then, three significantly different self-regulated learning profiles were obtained by two-step cluster analysis with those variables. Lastly, ANOVA was used to analyse the relation between the self-regulated learning profiles and academic achievement. The implications of these data for the educational practice at university are discussed.