How to Foster SRL

Self-regulated Learning (SRL) is a synthesis of cognitive strategies, meta-cognition, motivation, task engagement, and social supports. Based on educational psychology, several effective methods are provided to foster students’ self-regulated patterns in the learning process.

(Paris 2001)

Effective Methods in Different Learning Phases

Forethought Phase

      1. Strategy Planning:

•  Teachers should provide different types of strategies that students can use to plan their academic tasks, making students aware of potential strategies and connect it to successful outcomes. 

•  Teachers should introduce specific strategy information for students to know how and when to apply different strategies in specific situations. 

     2. Goal setting:

•   Guiding students to set up appropriate goals that are attainable yet challenging based on their own competence. 

• The goals should be clear and specific, providing explicit objectives with rubrics. 

In order to help students complete a challenging linguistic essay, teachers should provide students with a detailed rubric, as well as clear guidance and relevant resources. This can make the goals clearer and attainable. For example, "the essay should analyze from the aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse." This detailed rubric would help students build up the expectations for their final work and have a sense of control.

     3. Task Creating: 

• Teachers should provide open-ended tasks that elicit the intrinsic interests of students, provide opportunities for students to make decisions, set challenging goals, exercise control, and collaborate with others, which can promote students’ thoughtful engagement and derive feelings of self-efficacy and a sense of ownership. 

Take the environmental science class as an example: rather than giving students a closed task to read the textbook and answer the questions on the worksheet, teachers can provide students with an open-ended task to investigate a local environmental issue in their homeland. Students will work in groups to collect sources from interviews, articles, and observations. In the end, they will create a presentation to demonstrate their research findings and come up with several possible solutions.  This open-ended task is closely related to students' lives, which is beneficial for eliciting their intrinsic interests. Besides, the challenging task requires students' cognitive engagement, which will stimulate students' feelings of self-efficacy and give them a sense of ownership. This can motivate students to be self-regulated in the research learning process.

 (Paris 2001)

     Performance Phase

Self- reflection

1.   Teachers should guide students to attribute success to good strategies, which can encourage students to utilize them in the future.

2.  It’s also essential for students to set up internalized standards to evaluate their understanding, personal interests, and strategies used on a task.

For example, teachers can hold a class activity for students to do self-reflection in the writing class. Instead of grading students' writing directly, teachers can ask students to write a short paragraph to assess their own work according to their personal standard. This will make them be proud of their own writing as well as increase their self- efficacy. After that, teachers can hold a discussion for students to share the positive strategies they used in the writing process, asking them several questions like" What makes you feel good in the writing process? What good strategies contribute to this success?" This can help students make a connection between their actions and outcomes, making them more likely to utilize this strategy in future writing.

3. Self-assessment

• Self-appraisal : Helping students to review and evaluate their abilities, knowledge states, and cognitive strategies through metacognitive thinking

Give students a few guiding questions to review the work. For example, what methods are beneficial for me while reading? What abilities did I present in this writing?

• Authentic assessment activities: encourage students to reflect on their work and evaluate their efforts, feelings, and accomplishments during the process.

Guiding students to write reflective journals every week to review their daily learning process, including the efforts they take,  the difficulties they have overcome, and their personal feelings in the process. In the end, ask students to assess both their product and progress based on the journal. This thought-provoking assessment can help students develop feelings of ownership and responsibility for learning.

4. Be careful to use exams and grades to evaluate students. Students who have a history of poor performance may lose confidence and motivation in the exam. It will also lead to negative outcomes for those students who work only for extrinsic rewards.

(Paris 2001)

Specefic Teaching Approach: Project -based Learning

Project based Learning is a specific task-based approach demonstrating how to foster self- regulation patterns among students. At the beginning, it provides instructional units with meaningful driving questions that can elicit students’ interests. During the study process, the investigating form allows students to make plans and decisions, gather information and resources, and allocate responsibility among group members by themselves. PBL also emphasized that students need to create artifacts that are tangible results, which is helpful for students to make self-assessment and attribute the outcomes to the strategies they applied. This complex process requires students’ metacognition to monitor their progress and understanding, giving them responsibility for their own work and effectively promoting self-directed learning.

(Paris 2001)