Investigation of the relationship between secondary school students' attitudes towards distance education and self-regulation skills

Distance education, which enables students who were geographically separated from their institutions and teachers in previous years to benefit from course resources, emerges as a learning experience that is heavily included in education programs in higher education in the following years. The epidemic process, which affected the whole world at the end of 2019, has made this learning environment a necessity for students studying at all levels of education. In this process, some important points have come to the fore for primary and secondary school students who have not experienced distance education before. Students' attitudes and self-regulation skills are among these issues and are known to affect students' academic achievement. For this reason, it is thought that studies aiming to reveal the relationship between attitude and self-regulation skills are important for students who experience distance education for the first time. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between secondary school students' attitudes towards distance education and their self-regulation skills. The survey model, which is one of the quantitative research methods, was used in the study. The sample of the research consists of secondary school students studying at different grade levels in a private school network with a total of 144 branches in 63 provinces of Turkey between 2020 and 2021. Personal information form including demographic information in the study, "Distance Education Attitude Scale for Secondary School Students" developed by researchers to measure students' attitudes towards distance education, and the "Perceived Self-Regulation Scale" developed in 2015 by Arslan and Gelişli to evaluate the self-regulation skills of the students was used. As a result of the research, it was determined that while female students' attitudes toward distance education were more positive than male students, there was no significant relationship between students' self-regulation skill levels and gender. It has been determined that there are significant differences both in attitudes towards distance education and in students' self-regulation skills according to the grade level variable. It has been determined that there is a positive and significant relationship between students' attitudes towards distance education and their self-regulation skills. It is thought that this study will be a source for new studies on the distance education process at the secondary school level.