Academic Performance and Learning Self-Regulation in Chilean Professional Technical Secondary Students during COVID-19

Abstract

This study aimed to understand the relationship between academic performance and self-regulation learning strategies used by students in the context of emergency remote teaching. The investigation's design consisted of a descriptive-correlational one, and the sample included 80 students from a professional technical high school. In order to measure performance, the researchers not only considered each participant’s one semester’s final grades but also used a scale to get the phases of self-regulation of learning. Thus, the results showed that during emergency remote teaching, students: (1) perceive themselves as somewhat able to study, (2) consider that poor academic performance depends on external factors, (3) only sometimes review their study progress, and (4) in terms of the relationship between academic performance and self-regulation strategies for learning, it could be considered positive. Hence, the authors concluded that during the pandemic, students in Chile obtained better grades as they used more strategies, such as identifying the content they did not understand well, summarizing the main ideas, or establishing short-term academic goals. As a recommendation, educational communities should deploy efforts to foster self-regulatory processes as an ability to face dynamic scenarios and crises.