Self-regulated learning is like your
own little secret. It stirs from within you, and is the voice in your head that
asks you questions about your learning.
More formally, self-regulated
learning is the conscious planning, monitoring, evaluation, and ultimately
control of one’s learning in order to maximize it. It’s an ordered process that
experts and seasoned learners like us practice automatically. It means being mindful,
intentional, reflective, introspective, self-aware, self-controlled, and
self-disciplined about learning, and it leads to becoming self-directed.
Another secret about self-regulated
learning is its strong positive impact on student achievement. Just the
cognitive facet of it, metacognition, has an effect that’s almost as large as
teacher clarity, getting feedback, and spaced practice and even larger than
mastery learning, cooperative learning, time on task, and computer-assisted
instruction (Hattie, 2009).
Self-regulated learning also has
meta-emotional and environmental dimensions, which involve asking oneself
questions like these:
- How motivated am I to do the learning task, and how can I increase my motivation if I need to?
- If my confidence in my ability to learn this material sags, how can I increase it without becoming overconfident?
- Am I resisting material that is challenging my preconceptions?
- How am I reacting to my evaluation of my learning?
- How can I create the best, most distraction-free physical environment for the task?
Metacognitive questions include
these:
- What is the best way to go about this task?
- How well are my learning strategies working? What changes should I make, if any?
- What am I still having trouble understanding?
- What can I recall and what should I review?
- How does this material relate to other things I’ve learned or experienced?
Asking oneself these questions also
constitutes elaborative rehearsal, which is the thinking process that moves new
knowledge into long-term memory.
Just because we may practice
self-regulated learning doesn’t mean our students do. Most of us were among the
best students, especially in college, and the best students can become the
worst teachers because we quickly knew how to master the material.
In fact, few of our students
demonstrate self-regulation – not even those in professional schools. When
asked to identify the factors they considered important in their learning, 132
veterinary students most commonly cited the quality of their faculty’s
instruction, not their own effort or learning skills (Ruohoniemi &
Lindblom-Ylänne, 2009). Not surprisingly, younger, undergraduate students have
the same mind set. They see learning as something that is “happening” to them,
and our job is to make it happen and make it easy. After all, learning was easy
in elementary and high school, so why should it require much time and hard work
now?
How do you get students to practice
self-regulated learning? First, you explain to them what it is and how it will
benefit them and then have students do self-regulated learning activities in
class and as homework. Then you wait for them to see the good results.
Students don’t mind these
assignments. They’re short, low-stress, and worth a point or two, and students
learn about themselves. You don’t mind them either because, with 90% of them,
you just give credit for completion: pass/fail, all points or no points. Most
in-class activities don’t even require this. You need only to grade the major
reflective meta-assignments, the kind that accompany service-learning,
problem-based learning, or a lengthy simulation.
Let’s consider a few proven
self-regulated learning activities and assignments; many more are in Creating
Self-Regulated Learning: Strategies for Strengthening Students’ Self-Awareness
and Learning Skills (Stylus, 2013):
- Students answer two or three reflective questions on the reading or podcast.
- They write about what they learned by doing an assignment.
- They re-do the same or similar problems to the ones they miss on their homework and exams and explain the proper procedure.
- They describe their reasoning process in solving a “fuzzy” problem – how they defined the problem, decided which principles and concepts to apply, developed alternative approaches and solutions, and assessed their feasibility, trade-offs, and relative worth
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