Students’ self-regulated learning skills and attitudes in online scientific inquiry tasks

Teaching students to think and act as scientists through inquiry is at the core of recent science education. Although self-regulated learning (SRL) is acknowledged as crucial to performing scientific inquiry, much is yet to be understood about the specifics of students’ interactions with the scientific process. In the current study, we conducted an exploratory investigation of the role of students’ SRL and related attitudes when completing an online scientific inquiry-based task. A task with a Predict-Observe-Explain learning design was used to examine the role of students’ SRL and attitudes within specific phases of the scientific inquiry process. Participants were 233 students from an online undergraduate course. Four groups were identified with differing levels of SRL skills, challenge and confidence. We found that students with low SRL skills who also perceived a learning situation as challenging and had low confidence in their ability to learn, had difficulties designing effective experiments and correctly interpreting data. Implications and future studies are discussed.