Which of the following is not a benefit of teaching students to be self-regulated?

Self-regulated learning is the self-directive process through which learners transform their mental and physical abilities into task-related skills. This form of learning involves metacognitive, motivational, and behavioral subprocesses that are personally initiated to acquire knowledge and skill, such as goal setting, planning, learning strategies, self-reinforcement, self-recording, and self-instruction. Students self-regulate their learning not only through covert cognitive means but also through overt behavioral means, such as selecting, modifying, or constructing advantageous personal environments or seeking social support. Self-regulation extends beyond individualized forms of learning to include self-coordinated collective forms of learning in which personal outcomes are achieved through the actions of others. Self-regulated learning processes are implemented during three cyclical phases. Forethought phase processes anticipate efforts to learn and include self-motivational beliefs as well as task analysis skills, such as goal setting and planning. Performance phase processes seek to optimize learning efforts and include learning strategies, self-instruction, and self-recording processes. Self-reflection phase processes, such as self-judgment and self-reactions, follow efforts to learn and provide understanding of the personal implication of outcomes. Self-reflection phase processes, in turn, influence forethought regarding further efforts to learn. Through these cyclical phases, students self-regulate their learning metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally.

Sociocultural influences on SRL

Sociocognitive perspectives of SRL emphasize self-regulation as developing within the individual and assisted by external modeling and feedback. In contrast, sociocultural perspectives of SRL emphasize it as a fundamentally social process wherein students learn to internalize language, signs, and activities existing first in the sociocultural practices of their communities. This shift in perspective changes the emphasis from self- to coregulation.

From a sociocultural perspective, SRL is a stage occurring as children are socialized into speech patterns and practices. Coregulation is the temporary sharing or distributing of self-regulatory processes and thinking between a learner and more capable other (peer or teacher), while the learner transitions toward self-regulatory practice.

Three basic concepts characterize coregulatory aspects of self-regulation. First, rather than focusing on the individual learner, the focus is on the relationships among individuals, objects, and settings. Second, regulating learning involves coordinating and negotiating social contexts as well as self and social expectations and goals. Third, instructional supports afford opportunities for learners to experiment with and learn motivation as well as strategies and self-evaluations central to SRL.

Informed by Vygotsky’s notion of internalization, regulation is seen as a social process because it appears first on the intrapsychological plane and then later becomes part of a child’s understanding, appearing on the interpsychological plane. Borrowing from partners in learning and joint problem solving are considered core coregulatory processes in the social exchange between learners and more capable others. From this perspective, the mark of SRL is when the activity and practice appears in a learner’s own performance, and when those activities are internalized and automated.

SRL Perspective: Promoting Effective Learning Through Changes to Students’ Ability to Teach Themselves

A central tenet of the SRL perspective is that learners can potentially monitor, control, and regulate certain aspects of their own cognition, motivation, and behavior as well as some features of their environment (Pintrich, 2004). Students who do self-regulate their learning are more effective learners than those who do not. The characteristics of those who self-regulate their learning include:

A familiarity with and knowledge of how to use a series of cognitive strategies (e.g., repetition, elaboration, and organization) which help them to attend to, transform, organize, elaborate, and recover information.

A knowledge of how to plan, control, and direct their mental processes toward the achievement of personal goals (meta-cognition).

Evidence of a set of motivational beliefs and adaptive emotions, such as a high sense of academic self-efficacy, the adoption of learning goals, the development of positive emotions toward tasks (e.g., joy and enthusiasm), as well as the capacity to control and modify these, adjusting them to the requirements of the task and of the specific learning situation.

Ability to plan and control the time and effort used on tasks and knowledge of how to create and structure favorable learning environments, such as finding a suitable place to study and help-seeking from teachers and class mates when they have difficulties.

Evidence of greater efforts to participate in the control and regulation of academic tasks, classroom climate, and structure (e.g., how one will be evaluated, task requirements, the design of class assignments, and organization of work teams) when the context allows it.

Ability to put into play a series of volitional strategies, aimed at avoiding external and internal distractions, in order to maintain their concentration, effort, and motivation while performing academic tasks (Montalvo and Torres, 2004).

In a framework for classifying the different phases and areas for regulation, Pintrich (2004) describes a temporal matrix involving four phases, from forethought, planning and activation, to monitoring, to control, and, finally, to reaction and reflection. He sees each of these phases as being applicable to cognition, motivation/affect, behavior, and context. In cognition, for example, the students set specific goals for learning, are aware of progress toward those goals, have the ability to change directions if the strategies are not working, and make cognitive judgments on how they did. In motivation/affect, regulation would include attempts to regulate beliefs such as self-efficacy, goal orientation, task value, perceptions of task difficulty, and personal interest, as well as controlling emotions such as fear and anxiety. In behavior, regulation is focused, for example, on effort, control, time management, and help-seeking strategies, while regulation of context is about control of the environment. While the latter would not have been thought possible even 30 years ago in higher education, the growth of student-centered teaching approaches, where students are asked to make a greater input into processes, has meant that students do have influence over some aspects of the environment.

Self-regulators treat learning as an activity that they develop proactively rather than mere reactive processes stimulated by their reactions to teaching. Each process of self-regulated behaviors can be taught by parents, teachers, classmates, etc.

From this perspective then, the process of promoting effective student learning involves teaching the students to become more effective self-regulators of their learning. This is normally achieved through interventions embedded in the context of normal subject-matter teaching, and in which teachers play a crucial role.

Different types of intervention have been reported. Since the main objective is meta-cognition, the current emphases are on self-reflective practices and on instruction designed to scaffold the students’ development. To develop awareness and control of their learning, students must engage with and practice using a range of skills, know how they are used, know why one strategy is best used at one time rather than another, and know what effects the adopted strategy is having on learning. Modeling by the teacher of the key processes – planning, controlling the process, outlining the relevant sources, and reviewing what has been done – provides students with observable examples, and direct teaching of the self-regulation strategies are both fundamental starting points. However, it is the students who must engage in practice, in self-monitoring, and with the social support systems to achieve the levels of competence needed to self-regulate their own learning.

The development of ways of measuring the effectiveness of the interventions has not kept pace with the development of the explanatory frameworks behind the current thinking. Both the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) and the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) were designed before the many dimensions now considered to be a part of the SRL framework were identified. In including many of these dimensions, the latter is probably still the best quantitative instrument available.

While many learning-to-learn programs fit comfortably within the descriptions in this section, there are some, for example, those focused on developing specific skills such as reading, or on the development of mnemonic skills that do not. Simpson et al. (1997) note in a review of academic assistance programs that these programs have continued to flourish for a variety of reasons, one being that many university students are not self-regulated learners. They describe program models as being based on either a generic or embedded approach. Generic interventions are usually conducted outside of the teaching context (e.g., development of note-taking skills).

In a comprehensive meta-analysis of the effects of learning skills interventions on student learning Hattie et al. (1996) use effect size to gauge the effectiveness of a range of intervention programs in terms of students’ academic performance, change in study skills, and affective changes. The conclusions they draw from the meta-analysis are consistent with the conclusions in the literature at the time: the interventions are associated with increases in student performance, in study skills, and in affect and are effective most of the time. The effects are greatest on performance (effect size 0.57) and least for study skills (0.16). They conclude that the typical study skills package is not as effective as metacognitive and contextualized intervention, but it is significantly better than nothing. However, they also found that these effects are not uniform across the educational sectors. Of the 51 studies analyzed by Hattie and coworkers, 21 were from university or adult-learning contexts. Effect sizes from the university subsample, for performance, study skills, and affect are 0.27, 0.19, and 0.68, respectively. In terms of performance and study skills, these are small effect sizes, and such interventions cannot be considered to be major contributors to enhancing student learning. The moderate effect size for affect suggests that the interventions may change students’ attitudes to their work, and as noted in the notes above on self-regulated learning, students’ attitudes are related to aspects of their performance.

Instructor-led scaffolds

Wopereis et al. (2008) embedded information problem solving instruction in a distance education course to increase students’ abilities to solve web-based information problems utilizing websites and news groups. The online training emphasized the use of metacognitive activities, including monitoring, steering, and testing during students’ problem solving. The authors concluded that students in the experimental group who received the instruction “regulated” the information problem-solving process more often than those in the control group, and the researchers suggested this promoted “effectiveness and efficiency” in problem solving (p. 749).

Hadwin et al. (2005) examined how teachers scaffold students’ self-regulated learning (SRL). The authors paralleled the evolution of graduate students’ self-regulated learning with the compilation of their research portfolios. The data centered on an analysis of student–teacher dialogue over time for instances of teacher-directed, co-regulation, and student-directed SRL in task definition, goal setting/planning, and enacting. The research revealed a statistical decrease in teacher-direct regulation and a statistical increase in student-direct regulation over time. Hadwin et al. maintained the findings confirmed their hypotheses that “metacognition facets would become more prevalent as students developed experience and proficiency with the task” (p. 432). To this end, the authors highlighted the importance of designing computer-supported tools for learning to “target specific phases and facets of SRL” (p. 438). They also noted the need to “compare the effectiveness of static versus dynamic computer supported tools” for promoting SRL “at different phases and across different facets” (p. 438).

4.16.7.4 Differences in Conditions of Learning and Performance

Responses to performance measures of personality, as most tasks, require previously organized knowledge and strategies. However, we distinguish between learning that is promoted by direct teaching (e.g., lecture, textbook) from learning mediated by the individual's synthesis of experience (Epstein, 1994). Personality performance tasks are guided more by self-regulated learning than by formal education. Again, this distinction in the conditions of learning does not apply in a dichotomous fashion to personality versus cognitive measures. For example, an individual's general fund of information is a joint function of direct teaching and the individual's interest and active, effortful processing of information. Depending on the individual, knowledge is acquired through some combination of direct teaching and self-regulated synthesis of experience.

Task requirements also differ on the basis of the conditions of performance. These conditions pertain to the spontaneous versus cued accessibility of prior knowledge and degree of organization required to produce the response. Cognitive measures that assess general fund of information often elicit previously acquired knowledge in piecemeal fashion (highly structured). Personality performance measures such as the TAT and Rorschach set conditions of performance that demand spontaneous accessibility to prior knowledge to interpret the stimulus and formulate the response according to the directions. The more open-ended the response, the greater the need for self-regulated strategies to organize the product.

Performance measures of personality maximize the imprint of organization so that the principles by which experiences are structured and the inner organization of the personality are revealed. A comprehensive assessment battery provides tasks that vary on the continuum of structure provided. Given such variation, it is possible to relate competencies required in each task to performance in life situations requiring similar competencies. This linkage is accomplished by understanding how processes exhibited during test performance are carried over to everyday functioning in various situations and incentive conditions.

Selected Intervention Programs in Self-Regulation

Over the past 20 years, educational psychologists have developed a number of intervention programs designed to help students become more effective and efficient learners (Kauffman, 2004). Many of these programs have been studied empirically, but only a subset focused on helping students to function volitionally. Each program that we subsequently discuss included an evaluation component, and targeted at least one aspect of volitional functioning described above.

Challenging Learning Environments

Barriers to providing a quality education in resource classes can be daunting, including large caseloads of students with heterogeneous disabilities that span multiple grade levels, high levels of paperwork, and a need to collaborate with many general education teachers with whom special educators shared students (McLeskey & Waldron, 2011). However, well-managed learning can occur in any setting, and Seo, Brownell, Bishop, and Dingle (2008) provided vivid examples of the ways in which 14 special education teachers, most of whom provided resource support, used reading practices to engage elementary students with LD. These teachers were observed over a six-month period in a variety of contexts with class sizes that ranged from 6 to 28 students, and averaged 13 students. The practices of teachers most skilled in engaging students with LD reflected four themes: (a) high quality instruction; (b) responsiveness to students’ needs; (c) a positive socio-emotional classroom climate; and (d) promotion of student autonomy through choice-making and encouragement of self-regulated learning. It should be noted that only four teachers demonstrated these practices with relative consistency, with one considered most engaging, and three considered highly engaging. Most other teachers were less consistent with six demonstrating moderately engaging practices, and four demonstrating what were considered to be low engaging practices.

Those special educators who were most engaging and highly engaging were similar in many ways to highly effective general education literacy teachers, but they “provided more deliberate skill instruction, allowed less student managed instruction, engaged in more intensive teacher-led instruction, monitored student learning consistently, employed classroom management approaches that were more overt and explicit, and provided extensive feedback on student responses” (Seo et al., 2008, p. 118). As managers of instruction, the four teachers considered most and highly engaging made efficient use of instructional time, and engaged students extensively in academic rather than nonacademic activities. When students were highly engaged, teachers were observed providing “intensive teacher-led instruction that involved a lot of student questioning and included small group and large group instruction” (p. 118).

The special education teachers in this study used a variety of curricular materials, and had varying caseloads and levels of instructional and administrative support. Without drawing conclusions about the role that context might play in the implementation of engaging students with LD, the authors noted the two lowest engaging teachers provided instruction to the largest number of students. Additionally, they noted that teachers considered most engaging, highly engaging, and moderately engaging in teaching students with LD were more likely to be using structured interventions in addition to the core reading curriculum.

4 Contemporary Approaches to Learning

Most contemporary theories of learning assume that learning arises out of the internal conditions or states of the learner (that is, from the inside out rather than the outside in). In general, these internal factors are considered more important than external environmental factors. The learner does not merely ‘record’ or remember the material to be learned. Rather, he or she constructs a unique mental representation of the material and the task to be performed, selects information perceived to be relevant, and interprets the information on the basis of his or her existing knowledge and current needs. During this process, the learner adds information not explicitly provided by an outside source, whenever he or she needs such information to make sense of the material being studied. Most of these theories, to varying degrees, share three sets of beliefs. First, meaningful learning (i.e., learning for understanding) is an active, self-regulated, constructive, cumulative, and goal-oriented process. Second, learning is dependent on (situated in) the particular context in which it occurs. Third, learning is fundamentally a social, cultural, and interpersonal process; a process governed as much by social and situational factors as by cognitive factors. Each of these characteristics will be discussed.

Background

Despite what has come to be the general public’s perception of African-American children’s desire to achieve (see review by Spencer and Harpalani, 2008), Black youth in America set high academic goals for themselves (see Spencer et al., 2003). Yet, these socialized values and aspirations may be disputed as a function of matriculating through an educational system that, among other things, may neither financially nor socially support youth’s academic intentions and, instead, communicate low expectations. The dilemma continues to be particularly acute for African-American males (Spencer, 2002; Youngblood and Spencer, 2003).

In 1990, Simmons and Grady reported that in a southern Maryland suburb located just outside of Washington, DC, Black males and females performed equally as well as their white counterparts in both mathematics and reading until the third grade. However, during the fourth grade year, a sharp decline in criterion-referenced mathematics and reading tests results were reported. Additionally, the percentage of Black males in the top reading groups dropped significantly (from 23% to 12%) from grade four to grade six (Lewis et al., 2006; Simmons and Grady, 1990).

Unpacking and determining the causes of such findings is an imperative. Hypotheses about the most salient contributing factors include the examination of the school environment, inadequate self-reflection opportunities, and limited identity-exploration opportunities available to students. The implementation of strategies that take into account the factors noted, are thought to have implications for enhanced self-concepts and the development of increasingly positive attitudes and behaviors toward education. Support, experienced as positive change, can lead to broadened intellectual interests, improved self-regulated learning, greater commitment to education, and the framing of specific vocational plans and long-term aspirations (Fournet et al., 1998). As proposed, greater specification and exposure to supports, overall, have implications for resilient outcomes in spite of the persistence of socially constructed risk factors.

In fact, contrary to common public perception, African-American boys wish to complete school and many actually desire classes that are academically challenging. In a survey of 2250 African-American males in New Orleans, 95% reported an expectation to graduate from high school. Forty percent stated that they believed their teachers did not set high goals for them and 60% expressed a desire for their teachers to have higher expectations for them (Lewis et al., 2006). Yet, despite these findings, unfortunately, low teacher expectations are inferred by youth and begin to take shape at startlingly early ages. Garibaldi (1992) reported that of 318 teacher respondents, 60% of whom taught in elementary schools, approximately six in ten stated that they did not believe their Black male students would go to college. Strikingly, 70% of these teachers had taught for 10 years or more and 65% of these teachers were African American. These detrimental biases are also evident as a function of the rate at which Black males are excluded from the classroom. In particular, African-American male-student statistics indicate that they are disproportionately suspended and/or expelled, show poor scholastic performance, avoid academic engagement, and represent decreasing rates of college attendance (Garibaldi, 1992).

Children are undoubtedly perceptive, conscious and aware of many of the biases that surface in the classroom. As a result, they are unavoidably sensitive to their central placement within the social dynamic. Thus, experiencing these hardships may be detrimental to positive youth development. Experiencing the noted biases while entering into and navigating through adolescence may be even more salient for such youth. That is, the outcomes lay the groundwork for additional critical-developmental tasks to be achieved for successful transitioning into late adolescence and early adulthood.

As previously noted, adolescence is a difficult stage to navigate due to the constant changes in one’s physical and cognitive development. It is a time of heightened sensitivity to the many changes occurring both internally and externally. Consequently, adolescence may also bring about negative changes, including increased anxiety about school performance, social comparisons as a basis for assessing ability, confusion about the causes of one’s academic outcomes, and declines in intrinsic motivation (Zimmerman et al., 2000).

The negative psychological and behavioral outcomes noted may be exacerbated, while sources of protective factors, such as acknowledging youths’ strengths, abilities, and cultural traditions, often go ignored. The lack of attention to cultural variations and opportunities to utilize them as strengths and sources of support may, in fact, cause their value or inferred relevance to a particular cultural context to wane. When Black youth are socialized to devalue the experiences of their own culture and ignore the historical and contemporary significance of issues facing their own ethnic groups, their psychological and behavioral well-being is affected (Baldwin et al., 1987; Lewis, 2001).

For a better understanding of the phenomena of adolescent self-efficacy and resilience as it relates to perceived competence, invoking a theoretical perspective is useful. In this instance, Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) (Spencer, 1995, 2006, 2008) is useful when assessing how adolescents perceive, interpret, and act upon the stimuli that form their educational context. Given the task at hand, PVEST is beneficial due to its emphasis on meaning making as a potential contributor to youths’ vulnerability as well as resiliency. Additionally, the systems theory views the self-system processes as dynamic, as well as recognizes the bridge between the individual’s actions and societal context.

Taking into account that all humans are vulnerable, the PVEST framework consists of five components linked by bi-directional processes (Figure 2) (see Spencer, 1995, 2006, 2008), forming a cyclic, recursive model that explains identity development throughout the life course. The first component, net vulnerability level, represents the relationship or potential balance between risk factors versus protective-factor presence (e.g., protective factors as cultural capital). For urban minority youth, risks may be exacerbated by low socioeconomic conditions or sociocultural factors such as race and sex stereotypes. The second component, net stress level (i.e., challenges vs. supports), mediates between net vulnerability level and component three (i.e., reactive coping responses). The latter represents the state of balance between in-the-moment responses of maladaptive as opposed to adaptive strategic responses to confronted challenges. Particularly important at adolescence, an individual’s patterned reactive coping response (i.e., either maladaptive or adaptive), over time, becomes an internalized emergent identity (i.e., component four of PVEST). As illustrated in Figure 2, the emergent identifications can be either negative or positive. It is the consistent identity-linked set of behaviors that lead to component five (i.e., either unproductive or productive outcomes). Component five represent patterned sets of outcomes which have life-course implications. That is, as a productive or unproductive pattern, given the sets of developmental tasks associated with each developmental period of the life course, outcomes at one stage contribute to the subsequent period’s status of vulnerability (i.e., risk vs. protective factors) (refer to component one of PVEST in Figure 2). As suggested by its cyclic character, the PVEST framework recycles and recourses through the lifespan as individuals balance new risks against protective factors, engage new stress levels, given challenges potentially offset by supporters, try different coping strategies, and redefine how they and others view themselves. Throughout the process, as individuals navigate across time and place, new developmental tasks are presented, which require responses. Thus, in many ways, the theory postulates an unchanging state of human coping. As noted, vulnerability (i.e., both protective and risk factors) is consistently a part of human development across the life course. Adolescence, in and of itself, holds rather fascinating challenges given pubertal changes and the period’s critical transitional role in preparing youth for the longest period of the life course – adulthood. Self-efficacy is an important protective factor that promotes the process.