Measuring Self-Regulated Learning for Chinese International and Canadian Domestic Undergraduate Students in Canada

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is essential for academic success. Research shows that culture influences the engagement in SRL processes. However, there are limited cross-cultural studies investigating SRL; therefore, we aimed to validate an SRL measurement for Chinese international and Canadian domestic undergraduate students and to examine if the relationships between SRL engagement and academic performance differ across the two groups. First, we investigated the measurement invariance of the Regulation of Learning Questionnaire for both groups. Our findings confirmed the metric invariance across these cultural groups and identified items contributing to the scalar non-invariance. Additionally, we found that goal management was significantly associated with Canadian students’ course grades only, at the middle and end of a 4-month academic semester. In contrast, monitoring was significantly associated with semester GPA for both groups at the middle of the semester. Our findings emphasize the significance of evaluating measurement invariance across cultures and contribute to the extant literature on the relationship between culture and SRL.