Virtuous and vicious cycles of self-regulated learning remind me of shampoo.
Theobald et al.'s (2023) impressive conceptual replication study provides support for the cyclical aspects of learning.
Can I interest you in a research article with pre-registered hypotheses investigating the cyclical assumptions of self-regulated learning by analyzing intensive longitudinal data with 841 college students spanning 5 studies? Yeah, I thought I could. Theobald et al. (2023) have done some impressive work to investigate whether and how competence and value beliefs positively relate to goal achievement and then, critically, whether that goal achievement positively predicts competence and value beliefs (i.e., a virtuous cycle of self-regulated learning). In essence, positive motivation predicts positive learning, which promotes positive motivation, which promotes positive learning…and so on, and so on, and so on. Just like that old shampoo commercial:
The authors did find support for what I’ll call the “tell two friends, and so on” effect - or what others would more correctly call virtuous cycles of self-regulation.
Likewise, the authors investigated whether procrastination would be negatively related to goal achievement, which would lead to more procrastination, etc. (i.e, a vicious cycle). They didn’t find strong evidence for this cycle, and frankly, of the two types of cycles, I’d rather have evidence for virtuous than vicious ones.
However, the authors did find that procrastination mediated the relationships between competence and value beliefs and goal achievement. So, procrastination is still a troubling behavior.
I really liked how the authors analyzed these hypothesized relationships across five related but not exactly similar studies (i.e., conceptual replications of one another) and how they used meta-analysis to synthesize the findings. On the other hand, measurement was a challenge in these studies. They used a lot of self-report data (albeit at least those data were collected close to the events being measured, and in specific ways) so in the future the authors hope to do more with log data. But, the authors made reasonable decisions to measure complex, dynamic phenomena. Overall, this was a nice study with promising results that suggest getting people into a virtuous cycle can pay compounding dividends. Kudos!