Social support and online self-regulated learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education is adopting online teaching as a panacea to cope with its disruption. Despite university faculty’s efforts, college students need to develop online self-regulated learning to ensure that they achieve good academic performance in this unique learning context. While social support has been found to be an important facilitator of self-regulated learning in general learning contexts, whether and how it works in the pandemic context has yet to be explored. This study drew on social cognitive theory to investigate the relation between social support and online self-regulated learning by considering the mediating effect of online learning self-efficacy and the moderating role of gender. Data were collected from 2616 undergraduates in China who were home-quarantined and received online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of a Partial Least Squares regression found social support was positively associated with online self-regulated learning and online learning self-efficacy mediated this positive association in part. Further, the positive association that social support had with online learning self-efficacy and online self-regulated learning were both stronger among males than females. Implications for online education during the COVID-19 pandemic and future research are discussed.