Self-regulation as a predictor of successful completion of an accelerated online OER college mathematics course

The low rates of retention and success in online courses, especially in accelerated gateway online mathematics courses, prompted the research presented herein. Successful course completion in such courses is an important issue to address for educational leaders because students' failure to advance to subsequent courses is certain to impede further success in college for a multiplicity of programs of study, especially in the all-important science, engineering, and technology fields, but also in many other fields of human endeavor, such as business, economics, and finance. The purpose of this study was to identify self-regulatory behavior constructs that describe the degree of participants' self-regulatory functioning that influences successful course completion in an accelerated, online, OER, mathematics course at a state college in south Florida. Guided by Braxton and Hirschy's commuter-student retention research framework and based on extensive literature review and results previously reported in similar research studies, this study examined several self-regulatory behavior constructs that describe the degree of participants' self-regulatory functioning and their expected influence on successful course completion in the target student population. These constructs were goal setting, self-efficacy, and time and task management strategies. The study presented was a quantitative research study conducted via binary regression analysis. Multiple strategies were employed to analyze the data, such as partial and full model generation with and without cross-validation. Results were in agreement with similar studies conducted with different student populations. The main findings of the study were that time and task management strategies was the single most influential self-regulatory construct accounting for the change in the odds ratio of successful course completion in the target student population, and that goal setting did not translate to a useful predictor of the change in the odds ratio of successful course completion. Ambiguous influence could be attributed to the third identified construct, self-efficacy. It can be concluded from the study's findings that a combination of student related factors, such as the different self-regulatory predictor variables examined in this study, were influential factors for successful course completion in the target course, even though one of the identified factors, goal setting, could not be individually be confirmed as being a useful predictor of successful completion of the target course. Such self-regulatory constructs have previously been found to be influential in successful completion of other courses in other settings, a fact which strengthens the opinion that student related factors (most of which are also self-regulatory behavioral factors and less directly controlled by educational institutions) are seemingly more important for academic success than support structures provided by educational institutions currently address. Educational leaders should be aware of such research findings and modify their support structures so that the issue of poor retention and success in online courses can be more readily addressed.