Does Context Matter? Investigating Factors Related to Students’ Academic Achievement in Classroom and Online Courses

The aim of this thesis is to broaden the understanding of the relationships between target psychological constructs (i.e., self-regulation, motivation, self-theory of intelligence) and grades in a classroom setting as well as whether those target constructs are predictive of online course grades. We do so by collecting information from a large sample of undergraduate university students enrolled in either a traditional classroom or an online course and by analyzing the data using hierarchical regression analysis. In the present thesis, we demonstrate the strength of self-regulation and motivational constructs to positively influence classroom grades and present evidence that the constructs accounting for a significant amount of variance in classroom course grades are not applicable for explaining variance in online course grades. We discuss the implication of our findings as well as study limitations and point out potential direction for future work.