How temptation changes across time: effects of self-efficacy for self-regulated learning and autonomy support

Students often work on academic tasks in the face of an attractive alternative. In an experimental setting, we examined how students perceive temptation differently across time depending on their self-efficacy for self-regulated learning and autonomy-supportive contexts. Specifically, we focussed on how individual differences in self-efficacy for self-regulated learning interact with different autonomy-supportive contexts (provision of either choice or relevance) to predict students’ perceived temptation, affect, and performance across time. Results indicated that students low in self-efficacy for self-regulated learning perceived an increase in temptation across time, while those high in self-efficacy for self-regulated learning perceived a decrease in temptation across time. Moreover, we found that especially for students with low self-efficacy for self-regulated learning, providing choice opportunities or adding relevance to the task predicted lower temptation, higher positive affect, and lower negative affect.