Milton Yarbrough

Danika Hines

UCOL 2002 010

May 10, 2017

Final Project: Self-Regulation and Success

Self-regulation is defined as the ability to regulate or control yourself to be able to reach

an intended goal, academic self-regulated learning is when you are in an academic setting and

have goal that you intend to reach but certain things may get in the way but you regulate yourself

and get your learning done. There are three main elements when it comes to describing the

psychological elements that affect academic motivation and those three elements are values,

needs and expectations. Values are the reasons behind why we want to accomplish a task, or the

reasons we do not want to do that task, there are internal and externals sides to your values. Your

internal values consist of interest, utility, and the goal. Interest is when something excited you

turns you away it effects where you attention is, utility is the purpose that the task serves or

doesnt serve and the goal is what you want to achieve or do not want to achieve. The external

side of values are the incentives and the expectations of others. Incentives are things like money,

a grade or anything other than just the pride of just completing the task and expectations of

others are just what other people believe you are going to or what you should get done. Needs

are what drives you and this consists of achievement, competence, self-worth, and creativity.

Achievement is the success that you come by that takes effort or has a risk of failure, competence

is just the ability to do a task well, self-worth is how confident you are in yourself and how well

you view yourself, creativity is the ability to use your imagination to make new things.
Expectations look to see if you are able to accomplish a task or meet a goal this consists of

previous experience, success of others, feedback, self-efficacy and attribution. Previous

experience is pretty obvious it is just the experiences you have had related to that task or goal.

Success of others is comparing yourself to others seeing if they completed if you can or cannot,

feedback is the opinions or thoughts of others on your work. Self-efficacy is the confidence you

have in yourself to complete a task in a certain amount of time and attribution is how you explain

your success or failure. There are four stages to self-regulation and they are chaos, stability,

flexibility, and mastery. Chaos is when you are losing track of assignments not keeping up with

deadlines, not going to class and things of that nature, Stability is the first step past chaos and it

is when you begin to do all those things you were missing and begin to get a little bit of control

over your academic life. Flexibility is the step after stability and it consists of it is when you

become so stable in your life that you are able to change the means to complete your goal, you

dont always have to follow the same path and can find other ways to complete it. Mastery is the

final step and it is when you do these things automatically you no longer need to remind yourself

you just do. There is also a possibility of regression, falling back in the steps, because of new

situations or just stress on your life.

Self-regulation is your ability to stop yourself from doing the things that you want to do

and get the things that need get done done, time management goes hand and hand with self-

regulation time management is the ability to use your time effectively which is exactly what self-

regulation attempts to do. There are four assumptions that come with time management. The first

one is to start with your vision and goals and apply the SMART tactic to them to help you build a

strong base for managing your time. The second one is that you are the owner of your time and

you are able to do with it what you please, this is a very two-sided assumption, because you are
the owner you can do very productive things or you can spend your time getting nothing done

and having to rush to meet deadlines. The third assumption is about the amount of stuff you have

to do each day and our book gives a diagram where we can organize our stuff, when we get

something no matter what it is we have three options. Those three options are do it, file it, or

trash it. Doing it is divided into two pieces immediate tasks and projects, immediate tasks should

be taken care of first and projects you should make a plan to complete them, filing it is making

sure it is retrievable later and trashing it is just getting rid of it. The fourth assumption is asking

yourself what is the best use of your time and that is where planners come into play and that is

what I will be talking about next. The best way I have found to manage my time this semester is

I went to Walmart and got one of those desk calendars and then went through all of classes on

canvas and wrote down every assignment I needed to get done for that day on that day and then

when I wake up on that day I look at the calendar and make a list of the things I need to get done

and that night I sit down and look at the list and check of the things I did and it really made me

realize early on how many things I missed and helped regain control of my life.

There are six strategies for strengthening your willpower found in the book they are

ownership, self-esteem, intent, initiation, self-talk and mindset I will be talking about ownership

self-esteem and mindset. Ownership is taking full responsibility for your actions and is the base

for academic regulation and can be the hardest step. The book starts with examining how you use

your time and that is a great place to start because once you realize just how much time in a day

you can waste and how much you couldve gotten done that day you really begin to realize how

much you not doing those things can hurt you. Another thing ownership includes is this thing

called attribution which is how we explain our failures and success and being able to describe

why or how you failed is very helpful in developing your mindset. In college this is very
important especially because so much of the work we do is online and it is easy to forget what

we need to get done and when we fail to do the tasks sometimes we are not even aware of it, we

need to own our schedules and be able to take responsibility for what we do because we are all

adults now and thats what adults do. This is something that I feel like most people can deal with

a decently young age, things like if you make a bad play in baseball and it lets the other team get

a run you need to be able to take ownership of that mistake and learn from it and grow and

become a better person/baseball player. The second strategy I am going to talk about is self-

esteem, self-esteem is very important when it comes to your mindset if you dont belive you can

complete a task you are not going to do your best at it because you view it as an almost

impossibility. Your self-esteem is built from two things self-efficacy, how confident you are in

your abilities to complete a task, and self-respect, when you feel you deserve to be happy. The

book lists six more practices to help your self-esteem and they are to live consciously, this means

to understand whats going on in the world around you and be able to react to those

circumstances, to practice self-acceptance, this is just being your number one fan and to claim

what you do and who you are as your own, taking responsibility, being responsible for the goals

you want to achieve, practice self-assertiveness, this means to speak your mind and to be who

you are, to live purposely, this means to live to achieve the things you want to achieve, and to

have integrity, this means to behave within your values. College students always seem to have

high self-esteem they always seem to have it together but for most of us we do not and we need

help regulating our life and this class has really helped me begin to do that almost to the point

where I believe that all incoming freshman should be forced to take a class like this. This will be

very important in the workplace if you are not able to speak your mind and present ideas to other

people you will never get to the places you want to and if you do not take the risks you will
never be able to reap the rewards. The final strategy I will be talking about is your mindset, there

are two types of mindsets a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is when you

believe the things about you are set in stone, how smart you are how athletic you are how

talented you are cannot change and will stay the same and instead of working to better

themselves and tend to believe that the more talented a person is the more success a person will

have. A growth mindset is when people believe the things about them such as talents,

intelligence or other things of that nature can be developed through hard work and dedication

and these people tend to have a love of learning and tend to stand back up when they get

knocked down and learn from their mistakes. College students should really strive for a growth

mindset and will probably fail with a fixed mindset if you do not believe you can do something

or get better at something you will fail. This is just as important in the real world as it in college

there are plenty of jobs that require you to just grind out the work and get better and better and

climb the ranks of the place you work.

The two exercises I have found to be the most helpful to me are the reflections and the

Dr. Tom Boyd video. The reflections were actually way more helpful to me than I thought they

would be at first, I thought they were just going to be something I had to do every week and |I

really wouldnt pay much attention to it but as I did them I realized the questions they asked

were questions I should be asking myself often and each of those little 250 word essays I wrote I

saved to be able to learn from them later down the road. The Dr. Tom Boyd video was just for

bonus and I did it just because I needed the bonus but I really enjoyed everything he said the

things he said really stuck with me and I even downloaded that video for to watch again if I ever

felt the need to and that is something I never expected to do.