Student differences in self-regulated learning: Relating grade, sex, and giftedness to self-efficacy and strategy use.

Abstract

Forty-five boys and 45 girls of the 5th, 8th, and 1 lth grades from a school for the academicallygifted and an identical number from regular schools were asked to describe their use of 14 self-regulated learning strategies and to estimate their verbal and mathematical efficacy. The groupsof students from both schools included Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Students camefrom middle-class homes. Gifted students displayed significantly higher verbal efficacy, mathe-matical efficacy, and strategy use than regular students. In general, 1 lth-grade students surpassed8th graders, who in turn surpassed 5th graders on the three measures of self-regulated learning.Students' perceptions of both verbal and mathematical efficacy were related to their use of self-regulated strategies. Evidence of relations between students' strategic efforts to learn and percep-tions of academic self-efficacy is concordant with a triadic view of self-regulated learning.