Navigating uncertainty: associations of inquiry-based and self-regulated learning with tolerance of ambiguity and career adaptability

How school learning relates to students’ orientation toward ambiguity has drawn growing attention in educational research. Whether the learning that students already do at school every day is associated with how they meet ambiguity, however, remains largely unexamined. We addressed this question in Japanese public high schools, where inquiry is a required part of the curriculum and self-regulatory conduct is one of three evaluation perspectives applied to every subject nationwide. A cross-sectional survey of 1,340 second- and third-year students at three metropolitan public high schools was analyzed using structural equation modeling. We tested whether self-determined learning motivation, self-regulated learning (SRL), and inquiry-based learning (IBL) were associated with career adaptability, directly and through tolerance of ambiguity. We also tested whether the motivational regulations moderated those associations. SRL related to career adaptability directly, and indirectly through the ambiguity-related domains taken together. IBL related to it mainly indirectly, and specifically through need for complexity and novelty . SRL and IBL are therefore not interchangeable routes to career adaptability. Identified and intrinsic regulation, the more autonomous forms of motivation, were associated with how much students engaged in SRL and IBL. Only three of the 32 moderation tests survived correction for multiple comparisons. SRL was more strongly related to career adaptability under identified regulation , and both SRL and IBL were more strongly related to moral absolutism and splitting under external regulation . At those three points, motivation bore on what the learning went with, and not only on how much of it occurred. Because the design is cross-sectional, the findings are associations and do not establish causal relations.