1
Teachers College Record Volume 117, 020305, February 2015, 28 pages
Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University
0161-4681
Self-Regulatory Climate: A Social Resource
for Student Regulation and Achievement
CURT M. ADAMS
The University of Oklahoma
PATRICK B. FORSYTH
The University of Oklahoma
ELLEN DOLLARHIDE
The University of Oklahoma
RYAN MISKELL
The University of Oklahoma
JORDAN WARE
The University of Oklahoma
Background/Context: Schools have differential effects on student learning and development,
but research has not generated much explanatory evidence of the social-psychological pathway
to better achievement outcomes. Explanatory evidence of how normative conditions enable
students to thrive is particularly relevant in the urban context where attention dispropor-
tionately centers on the pathology of these environments rather than social attributes that
contribute to student growth.
Research Purpose: Our purpose in this study was to determine if a self-regulatory climate
works through student self-regulation to influence academic achievement. We hypothesized
that (1) self-regulatory climate explains school-level differences in self-regulated learning,
and (2) self-regulated learning mediates the relationship between self-regulatory climate and
math achievement.
Research Design: We used ex post facto survey data from students and teachers in 80 elemen-
tary and secondary schools from a large, southwestern urban school district. A multilevel
modeling building process in HLM 7.0 was used to test our hypotheses.