🧠 Self-Regulated Learning
Self-regulated learning (SRL), is a set of interrelated skills and motivations that control learning.
In this section:
Goal Setting
Planning
Monitoring
Goal Setting
Being intentional about your goals for a course can help you better learn the material.
Setting goals, not only about the grade you hope to get, but what you hope to get out of a class overall, can help you stay motivated when things get difficult, as well as help your course performance.
Previous research has shown that having goals that focus on self-improvement and mastery lead to deeper understanding of concepts, as well as increased motivation to learn. However, many students focus on comparing themselves to others and on more normative performance standards.
When setting goals for this class, use yourself as the baseline. How can you improve? What would progress look like for you? How does a grade demonstrate your mastery and understanding rather than your ability or rank?
Setting high-level and low-level goals have also been shown to relate to academic performance. Set goals not only for the course overall, but for class that day and upcoming assignments. This will help you be intentional throughout the semester, not just in the beginning.
Some common academic goals:
Mastery
Deep Understanding
Improved Skills
Grade Recognition
Personal Growth
Planning
Selecting appropriate strategies and resources will help increase academic success.
After setting goals for a course, it’s important to use that to identify the critical features within that goal and a set of strategies in order to move toward accomplishing that goal. A big part of this process is resource management.
Students who use the course syllabus to identify important dates in order to create a study schedule are much more likely to do well in a course than those who do not. It’s also been found that students who utilize a variety of resources available to them (study guides, practice tests, study groups, etc.) are also more likely to succeed in a college course.
Resource Management
Resource management not only refers to class materials, but also your regulation of internal resources. For example, how you allocate your attention, effort, and time is equally important.
If you find yourself to be most alert in the afternoons, use that time for your most demanding tasks. If you find yourself struggling to keep your eyes open after lunch, schedule your study time accordingly!
Try these planning strategies:
Find the optimal time of day for certain tasks and prioritize them
Plan ahead– use a calendar or planner to note important dates, deadlines, and obligations and work backwards to plan your time in between
Start assignments well before the due date and work on larger assignments a little bit each day
Monitoring
Keeping track of your progress helps you keep moving towards accomplishing your goals.
After setting goals, planning your strategies and resource allocation, it is equally important to track your progress. Research studies have found that students who monitor their progress and learning are more likely to get the grade they had hoped for.
Tracking your progress can be at multiple levels - at a course level and an individual task level (i.e., homework, quiz, etc.). At a course level, it’s important to ask yourself if you are on track to accomplish your goals and do well in the course. At a task level, it’s important to ask yourself if your approach is working, how close to a solution are you, and should you perhaps try a different strategy to finish the task.
Continually checking in with yourself helps you become more aware of what you know and what you don’t know. This can help you revise your planning and resource allocation. Perhaps you realize that while you feel like you understand the material during class, when you try to apply that learned material to your homework, you’re struggling. There’s a gap in your understanding somewhere! Identifying that you have the gap is equally important to filling that gap by utilizing different resources (office hours, study groups, etc.)
Try these monitoring strategies:
Keep a calendar
Review material before class
Set reminders
By spacing out your repeated self-testing, you’ll be maximizing both strategies!