The Relationship between Students' Self-Regulated Learning and Reading Comprehension in Iranian Online Classes in the COVID Era

In the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic, online instruction has become essential. It requires its teaching and research methods, and many social and psychological factors are at play here. One such factor is self-regulation, which is believed to affect learning. To clarify this issue, the present study used Cho and Cho's (2017) online self-regulation questionnaire with 30 items on a Likert scale and the reading comprehension section of the English Test as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) with 40 items. The instruments were adapted to Google Forms and sent to 297 students via a university LMS in 2021. 184 students returned the questionnaire, of which 12 had to be removed because the responses showed traces of inattention. The remaining 172 responses and their respective reading grades were analyzed via a one-sample t-test. The results confirmed that students' performance on the TOEFL test and self-regulation levels were satisfactory. A bivariate correlation, though, revealed no statistically significant relationship between these variables. There are several explanations for this result (e.g., online instruction was not voluntary for participants). Possibly, students were not motivated to learn. They may not have the necessary skills and tools for this type of instruction. However, simultaneous quantile regression showed that the high-achieving students in the present sample could apply their strategies of self-regulation in online English classes.