Reaction and Reflection: Conceptual
Background and Definition
The metacognitive processes involved in
self-judging and making causal attributions to personal
performance.
The final SRL phase involves a student evaluating
and judging their performance and making causal attributions for
their performance. Students who do not self-evaluate their
performance or who are not cognizant of the importance of
self-evaluation, tend to engage in surface (vs deep) processing in
learning and also tend to display more negative affect and lower
effort (Pintrich, 2002). Taking time to reflect on
one’s learning and learning processes is associated with more
successful academic outcomes. Stated briefly, SRL
reaction and reflection strategies are defined as
a student’s self-judging their performance and making causal
attributions for their performance.
Upon completion of an academic task, a student may
reflect on the outcome and experience an affective reaction.
If the outcome was successful goal attainment, happiness may
result. Conversely, academic failure may produce anger or
sadness. The specific causes the student attributes to their
success or failure (causal attribution) are hypothesized to impact
the development of future levels of motivational beliefs (e.g.,
academic self- efficacy, academic self- concept), and thus, future
learning (Pintrich, 2000). Finally, a student’s
thoughts about their behavior (e.g., amount of actual study time
vs. planned study time) is important for SRL via the mechanism of
choice. For example, “they may decide that
procrastinating studying for an exam may not be the most adaptive
behavior for academic achievement. In the future, they may
decide to make a different choice in terms of their effort and time
management” (Pintrich, 2000, p. 469).
