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This dissertation consists of a theoretical review and two empirical studies investigating college students’ academic effort beliefs (AEB) and their relationship to academic functioning. The overarching goal of this project was to (a) better understand how college students think about effort as it relates to their academic endeavors, (b) develop a comprehensive self-report measure of these beliefs, the Academic Effort Beliefs Scale (AEBS), and (c) identify the extent to which these beliefs predict important academic outcomes. A comprehensive literature review of the theoretical and empirical research conducted on students’ general effort beliefs was conducted and includes an evaluation of several different conceptualizations of effort beliefs, highlighting their multidimensional nature. This review concludes with a proposal to utilize models of self-regulated learning (SRL) as a guiding framework to further explore the nature of AEB and their associations to academic outcomes.In the first empirical study, a cognitive interviewing procedure (Karabenick et al., 2007) was employed to test college students’ ability to successfully engage the cognitive processes necessary to respond to self-report items designed to assess their AEB. These items included modified items from several existing scales and newly-developed items. The results of this study demonstrated students were able to understand AEB items, recall relevant memories, and select appropriate responses. These findings suggested that self-report items are an appropriate means of assessing how students think about effort in academic contexts. In the second empirical study, a large sample of college students responded to the AEBS at the beginning and end of a single semester. Factor analyses revealed the AEBS produced a second-order factor structure comprised of four first-order factors: Ineffectual, Outcome, Internalized, and Difficulty beliefs. Results from a mixed-factorial ANOVA revealed that students’ scores on the AEBS significantly increased over the course of the semester; this was particularly true for students who were enrolled in a learning-to-learn course, who reported much more favorable views of expending effort in school by the end of the semester. After conducting a series of structural equation models, it was found that students’ AEB at the beginning of the semester strongly and significantly predicted their use of SRL strategies, behavioral engagement, intentions to graduate, and to a slightly lesser extent, their achievement. Finally, discriminant validity analyses provided strong evidence that AEB are an important and unique set of beliefs, apart from students’ implicit theories of intelligence, epistemic beliefs, and self-efficacy. In sum, this dissertation revealed that college students’ AEB are multidimensional, likely to improve in facilitative contexts, and predictive of important strategic, behavioral, and achievement-related outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of continuing to study AEB and support the inclusion of these beliefs in future research on students’ SRL. |
