Social-distance education: struggling with cognition, emotion or motivation during SRL?

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic dramatically changed the educational landscape as emergency remote teaching strategies had to be implemented almost worldwide changing educational practices and reducing student-teacher contact. This comes with many challenges for students, who had to rely on their self-regulatory skills more than ever. To get an overview over challenges connected to social-distance education, we conducted a survey study (N = 119) to find out more about self-regulatory challenges students face during this digital semester. The results show that students seem to rate motivational and emotional challenges most severe and to have less issues with cognitive and metacognitive challenges. This has implications on what should be focused on in upcoming (socially distanced) semesters as providing highly structured learning material to foster students’ understanding of the content material may not entirely solve the most pressing challenges for students.