Personal self-regulation as a variable student (presage)

The self-regulation that people use in daily life has not traditionally been studied by educational psychologists. However, after Zimmerman showed the existence of common processes in different domains, experts have taken an interest in analyzing the self-regulating components common to different spheres (education, work, and health). This model considers personal self-regulation as a presage variable in the teaching-learning process. The Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ) designed by Brown, Miller and Lawendowski has been used most often in the research on personal self-regulation. Several studies have examined this instrument’s psychometric characteristics, leading to development of the Short Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SSRQ). This short version has been shown to be a plausible alternative to the long version, in a Spanish sample (Pichardo et al., in review). There is little research in the educational sphere that treats self-regulation as a presage variable; most cases have focused on the more restrictive variable of self-regulated learning. However, studies have shown the importance of including personal self-regulation, in its full sense, as a presage variable. We can infer that the interaction of personal self-regulation with other variables, whether personal (age, gender) or academic (learning approaches, coping strategies, academic selfregulation, regulatory teaching, resilience, etc.), constitutes an interesting, novel focus when analyzing the teaching-learning process at university. We have seen the value of this study, due to the importance of this variable and the dearth of research studies to date that treat educational variables and personal self-regulation.