Strategy Motivation and Strategy Use: Role of Student Appraisals of Utility and Cost

There is substantial evidence that students’ use of self-regulated learning strategies is directly related to their motivation to achieve desired learning outcomes (designated outcome motivation: OM). Further, motivational beliefs about the strategies themselves (designated strategy motivation: SM) may also influence strategy use. In the absence of systematic analyses of SM, we examined beginning U.S. high school students’ ( n = 253) appraisals of the utility and cost of using cognitive, metacognitive and resource management strategies and their reported use of those strategies in mathematics classes. Students who appraised a strategy as higher in utility reported greater frequency of use, but perceived cost was only a weak inverse function of reported use. Mixed effects modeling used to examine relations across strategies within students also verified that strategy use was positively related to its perceived utility for most students. However, relations between reported strategy use and perceived cost varied considerably: inversely related, unrelated, and for a sizable proportion of students even positively related. We discuss the necessity of developing a model of SRL that includes SM as well as OM influences on learning strategy use and learning outcomes, and the importance of within-person in addition to between-person analytic approaches to understand self-regulated learning.