Measurement of optimal learning environments: Validation of the parents' attitudes towards self-regulated learning scale

AbstractParents' attitudes towards self-regulated learning and their influence on children's learning behavior have been a rather neglected area of research. One reason for this is very likely the lack of a suitable measurement instrument. We adapted a measurement instrument designed to assess primary teachers' attitudes towards self-regulated learning for use with parents and validated it on a sample of 664 parents and their primary-school children. The instrument measures parents' attitudes towards various cognitive and metacognitive strategies that have been shown to be particularly effective in self-regulated learning processes of primary-school children. In a first step, the factor structure and the theoretical appropriateness of the instrument was verified via a confirmatory factor analysis. In a second step, the validity of the scale was tested with a structural equation model. Parents' attitudes towards self-regulated learning predicted how they facilitated the learning environment of their children; we measured parents' learning-environment facilitation with two scales: parental autonomy support during learning and setting up children's homework workspaces. The path between attitudes towards self-regulated learning and learning-environment facilitation was mediated by parents' self-efficacy regarding learning support. The criterion variable, parents' learning-environment facilitation, then, in turn, predicted students' school achievement as assessed with grades and a standardized test. These initial results suggest that the adapted instrument is useful for assessing parents' attitudes towards self-regulated learning and that these attitudes seem to influence the kind of learning environment parents create.Keywords: self-regulated learning, attitudes, parents' learning-environment facilitation, parents, learning strategiesThe attitudes that parents hold about school and learning have a large influence on how they create their children's home learning environment. Noack (2004), for instance, showed that maternal values predict the amount of time that mothers spend on academic activities with their children and the mothers' levels of the school involvement. DavisKean (2005) found that parents' educational beliefs and expectations for achievement influence the learning environment. Parents who held higher aspirations for their children's scholastic achievement spent, for instance, more time playing with their children and reported more positive parent-child interaction at home.Despite the existence of a number of findings on the influence of parental attitudes on the learning environment, studies are lacking on parental attitudes towards self-regulated learning and how these influence how parents facilitate their children's learning environments at home. Considering attitudes towards self-regulated learning appears relevant as, to cite one reason, self-regulated learning is a key competency (Council of the European Union, 2002) that has an impact on academic achievement (e.g., Paris & Paris, 2001; Winne, 1995; Zimmerman, 1990) and learning motivation (Pintrich, 1999). Research on teachers indicates that their attitudes towards self-regulated learning influence how they design and set up their students' school learning environments (e.g., Dignathvan Ewijk & van der Werf, 2012; Lombaerts, de Backer, Engels, van Braak, & Athanasou, 2009; Steinbach, Obergriesser, & Stoeger, 2015). We, therefore, assume that parents' attitudes towards self-regulated learning influence how they design and set up their children's home learning environments. We refer to this as parents' learningenvironment facilitation.One reason for the lack of research on the relationship between parental attitudes towards self-regulated learning and learning-environment facilitation may be that no measurement instrument exists for assessing the attitudes of parents towards self-regulated learning. The adaptation of an instrument designed to assess teachers' attitudes towards selfregulated learning for use with parents appears not only necessary, but also possible. …