As universities seek to innovate to meet the needs of students, compressed courses are becoming more prevalent. This study compares a compressed-format course to a traditional format course in economics that were each taught in the summer. Results indicate that student performance in a compressed course differs in meaningful ways. Effort-based…

Purpose: The study aims to assess students' perceived mastery of reasoning-for-complexity competency and its sub-competencies in a sample of students in a Latin American university. The intention was to identify statistically significant differences between a population of men and women with similar sociocultural characteristics, assessing whether…

Higher education students utilize Open AI tools such as ChatGPT as learning aids when confronted with academic challenges during their learning journey. Prior work has established that adaptive and maladaptive forms of academic help-seeking are closely related to achievement goals, which could lead to different patterns of using ChatGPT as a…

The vast amount of data collected during online learning offers opportunities to advance newer interventions that might aid learning. One such intervention has been learning analytics dashboards, visualizations designed to translate learning-related data into usable information. However, many student-facing dashboards compare learners' performance…

Background/purpose: The increasing integration of digital technology in education underscores the need for instructional models that support personalized, skill-based, and problem-solving focused learning. While traditional pedagogies often fail to address these needs comprehensively, this study proposes that the Mastery Adaptive Problem-Solving…

Undergraduate STEM lecture courses enroll hundreds who must master declarative, conceptual, and applied learning objectives. To support them, instructors have turned to active learning designs that require students to engage in "self-regulated learning" (SRL). Undergraduates struggle with SRL, and universities provide courses, workshops,…

Background: Mastery and performance goals are typically measured as trait-like abstract goals. However, in their daily academic pursuits, students pursue more concrete goals. The pursuit of these goals is replete with obstacles that can lead to an action crisis. Aims: We examined how mastery and performance goals affect progress, effort and…

It has been suggested that self-organized study groups need to regulate their learning at three levels: the self-, the co-, and the socially shared level. Yet, little is known about how individual learner characteristics influence these regulation processes. In this study, we investigate how students' achievement goals are associated with…

Background: Encouraging students to adopt a mastery goal orientation can help increase learning and motivation. However, the effect of mastery goal orientation interventions specifically in upper-division online elective psychology courses has not been studied. Objective: The purpose of this replication study was to examine the effects of a…

Computer programming is a skill of increasing importance in scientific and technological fields. However, in introductory computer science (CS1) courses in higher education, approximately one in every three students fails. A common reason is that students are overwhelmed by an accelerated and inflexible pace of learning that jeopardizes success.…

Mastery-based assignments typically provide students with multiple opportunities to improve their performance, but getting students to take advantage of these opportunities is difficult. We report on the implementation of a two-part series of nudges designed to improve students' engagement with and performance on mastery-based assignments in…

Guided by a framework promoted by Zimmerman (2000) and empirical evidence, this research examined the relationship between achievement goals involving mastery goal and performance goal and PERMA (positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning and accomplishment) that might affect lifelong learning. A total of 274 prospective mathematics…

The present study examined how information about different grading systems affects students' course expectations, particularly in ways that may have downstream consequences for learning and other academic outcomes. In an online experiment using a preregistered design, we prompted two samples of current and recent college students (N = 547) with a…

This study assessed the combined effects of students' achievement goal orientations (performance-approach goal and mastery-approach goal) and contextual factors (goal structures and task difficulty) on their performance. Researchers first asked 313 junior students about their achievement goal orientations and then randomly assigned them to one of…

Collaborative argumentation has been recognized as a powerful means to facilitate conceptual change of scientific concepts for which students have robust misconceptions. However, eliciting and maintaining collaborative argumentation that yields such productive outcomes is known to be difficult. Specifically, social-motivational antecedents have…