To make the structural passage from the strait-laced world of secondary schooling to the exacting autonomy of higher education, a deep behavioral change is called for in the way students manage their academics. Yet conventional pedagogy has a habit of viewing student development as a matter of passively receiving knowledge and in so doing does not give enough weight to the self-regulation and executive functioning that collegiate cohorts are expected to exercise. In the absence of any self-management apparatus, one can expect an academic shock in the early stages of a degree; it shows up in the form of cognitive overload, extreme procrastination and attrition of a catastrophic order. Educational psychologists have set about formalizing Structured Academic Self-Management (SASM) in response to this pedagogical shortcoming.
The theory is that scholastic success of any lasting kind is contingent on the explicit and active pursuit of metacognitive monitoring, intrinsic motivation and the prioritization of tasks. We put forward this mixed-methods study to put numbers to the long-term effect of SASM strategies on the graduation velocity and cognitive stamina of undergraduates. Our quantitative work is based on a stratified random sample of 850 students in Europe and North America from which we obtained an 88.5 per cent return. Any variables absent from the dataset were dealt with by means of multiple imputations by chained equations (MICE) in keeping with the methodological standards of DOAJ and COPE.
The qualitative leg of the project entailed 60 semi-structured interviews with those in the field of academic retention; using a constructivist grounded theory we were able to chart where institutional friction meets the teaching of formal self-regulation. With our hierarchical regression models we found a highly significant correlation (p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.95) in the data between sustained survival at college and early uptake of SASM. It is plain from the evidence that to put a student through without the formal structure to support his or her self-management is an institutional risk one cannot countenance; academic ownership is to be made a requirement of pedagogy.