Preface Acknowledgements Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 URLs References
SELF-REGULATION *
PRINCIPLES FOR ENCOURAGING SELF-REGULATION *
Focus on Content Mastery *
Attributional Feedback *
Increase Student Awareness of Their Own Self-Regulation *
Engender Positive, Realistic Views of Student Self-Efficacy *
Model Self-Regulated Learning *
Provide Practice for Self-Regulated Learning Strategies *
Make Your Web Tasks Opportunities for Student Self-Regulation *
EXPLICIT TRAINING *
DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC SELF-REGULATION *
Implicit Conventions *
Overarching Notions and Ways of Thinking *
Experts versus Novices *
EXAMS *
VIDEOCONFERENCING *
GLOSSARY *
REFERENCES *
URLs *
Promotion of Self-Regulated Learning
The early literature about students using the Web describes successful students in terms that teachers frequently use to describe students who traditionally succeed. While all teachers enjoy these successful students very much, many students come to us in less than perfect form to succeed at the tasks we ask of them. This chapter is about making students better at academic survival. A goal for us in writing this book has been to direct readers toward what we believe to be the best available literature to assist you when making Web course design choices. Thus far, the literature related to Web teaching has spoken about the less than perfect students with a single voice – don't admit them. While that strategy nearly always leads to teacher success, it does not address the realities of the students we meet.
In traditional settings, the instructor controls the classroom to some degree. Class attendance may be a requirement. Students in a class can engage in activities; participation can be an integral part of their grades. Over the Web, students have much more freedom than in a classroom. They may be logged into a Web site, but not even in the room. It is not possible for the instructor to tell exactly what students are doing. Students who are poor at self-regulation easily can be "slaughtered" in Web-based courses. On the Web, if your students are not self-regulating, how can you hope for success?
The research literature in the area of self-regulation often is found under the heading metacognition {U09.01}. While literature about Web teaching is sparse on this issue, there is a rich literature about distance learning. In distance settings, attrition rates (lack of success rates) of 50% are commonplace. But it is not clear that high dropout rates are intrinsic to the distance process. Kevin Cox {U09.02} suggests that: "If you have a high drop out rate then all other things being equal you probably have a poor course."
A very basic question about teaching, especially college teaching, is "can we do much anyway?" Christy Horn's work (studies of introductory biology classes [Horn et al., 1993; Horn, 1993, 1995]) determined that the biggest fraction of lack of success can be attributed to students’ not trying! Worse yet, this problem is not localized; it is widespread at major universities. Students who do not attend classes, do not interact with the learning materials, and, therefore, have very low success rates. Horn's work is representative of many that document the breadth of a troubling situation. Instructors can do only so much to improve their teaching before the lack of student involvement becomes a limiting factor.
There is substantial hope that successful interventions are possible, however. As one of several responses to Horn’s results, faculty have developed Web pages for student use. For example, William Glider [1996] has developed Web pages with opportunities for submitting questions, access to tutorials and old quizzes with answers and discussion, and enrichment materials. Questions are entered using standard HTML form elements. Glider has documented improved student learning [Horn et al., 1997]. Recently Shin [1998] suggested guidelines for instructional design that might promote students' self-regulation. Keller [1999], originator of the ARCS model of motivational design (A = attention, R = relevance, C = confidence, and S = satisfaction) suggests ways to use this in computer-based instruction and distance education. Puntambekar & duBoulay [1997] describe a system, Metacognition in Studying from Texts (MIST), that includes three features to foster metacognition. Their system was used more productively by high ability than low ability students, however.
Self-regulation concerns the entire range of factors that affect student performance. Intelligence is a controversial construct describing factors about which teacher impact, at best, is limited. Self-regulation is something that is teachable and not especially constrained by intelligence [Symons et al., 1989]. Self-regulation accounts for the ability of persons of modest intelligence to become skilled masters of very complex tasks.
Interventions aimed at improving self-regulation are one way for teachers to impact students' lives. According to Gregg Schraw, teaching self-regulation may be the most important thing a teacher can do for students; it may amount to empowering them to be lifelong learners. This kind of thinking pervades the community of educational psychologists studying these issues:
A new vision of education is emerging. It is one in which children are provided procedural instruction throughout their academic careers, one in which strategy instruction is at the heart of education. This reflects the belief that a major goal of schooling is to teach people how to read, write, and solve problems.
Symons et al., 1989, p. 1
While there is reason to be very optimistic, there still is every reason to acknowledge that enhanced performance resulting from some training about self-regulation is unlikely to work miracles. Most of what Web-Teaching deals with concerns teaching and learning beyond grade 7, with an emphasis on advanced high school, college, graduate education, and industrial training. When good jobs are involved, it is an easy matter to see how to improve self-regulation. Indeed, good suggestions to improve one's performance are likely to be welcomed and embraced quickly. In school, those who are poor self-regulators are unlikely to be quickly changed in spite of the hope that self-regulation can be taught to nearly all learners.
Self-regulation is a relatively new construct in research on learning. Self-regulated learners attempt to adjust the characteristics of their behavior, motivation, and cognition to fit the task at hand. Perhaps most important, control and goal setting come from within the student; they are not externally imposed.
Self-regulated learning involves the active, goal-directed, self-control of behavior, motivation and cognition for academic tasks by an individual student.
Pintrich, 1995, p. 5
Interest in enhancing student self-regulation relates to compensatory effects. Given two persons with different skills, one with very high knowledge but low self-regulation, and the other with average knowledge but good self-regulation, the second person is more likely to be successful at a task in a given knowledge area than is the first. Self-regulated learners actively control the learning environment. They schedule appropriate amounts of time, find physical environments appropriate for their effective study, have materials ready, plan human resources as needed (e.g., peer helpers and tutors.) Self-regulated learners work to control their motivation and find ways to deal with anxiety. They opt for study time instead of electronic games. Finally, self-regulated learners choose cognitive strategies that have higher payouts; they seek to understand ideas and material rather than just memorize and recall.
Motivation is the process whereby goal-directed activity is instigated and sustained.
Pintrich & Schunk, 1996, p. 4
Of course, we'd all like students to be self-regulated learners. Indeed, we ourselves strive to be self-regulated. If you're reading this book, you're almost certainly self-regulated. This book might find its way to being a text in a few graduate courses, but more likely it will be read by teachers seeking to improve their teaching. So, if you're reading this page, you're self-regulating. How do we teach our students to be self-regulating?
Self-regulated learning is a way of approaching academic tasks that students learn through experience and self-reflection. It is not a characteristic that is genetically based or formed early in life so that students are "stuck" with it for the rest of their lives.
Pintrich, 1995, pp. 4-5
Self-regulation is a new-enough construct there has been little research into how to teach it. There still is dispute among experts as to how generalizable self-regulation strategies are, particularly as they pertain to understanding one's own cognition [Borkowski et al., in press].
It shouldn't surprise anyone that tests of strategies for teaching this material using the Web are not available. In fact, there are two extremes of Web instruction. At one end, you'll be using a small portion of course supplementary material on the Web; at the other, nearly the entire course will be Web-delivered. Obviously the ways in which you, the teacher, might go about working to enhance self-regulating skills in students will be a function of the situation in which you operate.
Rather than assessing what was needed to complete the task assigned to them, mastery oriented individuals apparently approached the task of learning biology as a knowledge construction task which led to increased performance on the classroom performance tasks, as well as the knowledge construction tasks.
Horn, 1993, pp. 52-53
The focus should be on content mastery rather than task mastery. One way to do this is explicitly link assignments to content mastery and explicitly point out the relationships.
Attribution {U09.03} is the perception of causality, or the judgment of why something has occurred [Weiner, 1972]. As it turns out, the allocation of responsibility for why something turned out the way it did materially influences subsequent behavior. Discussions of attribution fall under three rather distinct categories: locus of control (i.e., internal vs. external causes), stability (i.e., short vs. long-standing effects), and controllability (i.e., controllable vs. uncontrollable).
Locus of control deals with issues about whether success is or is not in the realm of an individual's capabilities. None of your authors can play basketball anything like Michael Jordan. All three of us can do calculus problems. Intelligence (IQ) and athletic ability are very real. Learners who have decided that a task is beyond their capability don't try, and don't succeed. The cause of their failure is perceived to be outside their realm of control.
Stability is the part of attribution that permits someone to write off poor performance to a "bad day." In the student's view, intelligence is something that doesn't change. Teachers do. So, if the student attributes lack of success to a teacher, then next time, "I'll do better with a new teacher." In an online course, the student might say, "Next time I'll take this course in a classroom rather than over the Web. I failed because it was taught on the Web." The cause of the failure is not perceived as permanent; the cause of the failure will go away.
Controllability is a third dimension of attribution. While we may have the ability to sink seven of ten foul shots, your authors certainly don't practice in a fashion that would elicit such a performance. A student in a Web course with deadlines might decide that there is not enough time to learn the material, and thus not put forth effort. Controllability is the part of attribution that permits us to think we'll do better if we work harder.
Learners will do better when they believe they are able, that any impediments are temporary, and that effort will pay off [Wood & Locke, 1987; Vrugt et al., 1997]. Unfortunately, students seem to attribute more and more of their failures to external, long-standing, and uncontrollable causes, and less and less to internal, short-term, or controllable causes. As a result, they often simply fail to put forth the necessary effort.
Whenever something new comes along, there is a ready-made excuse that poor performance is due to whatever is new. The Web is new, and may well become such a target.
Self-monitoring {U09.04} is the basis for awareness of one's self-regulation. In some ways it is akin to an architect's plans for a house versus what actually is built. It is hard to make self-monitoring happen, especially to get students to disembed actions or processes from complex contexts, and to relate them to outcomes.
Journaling is one of the most common strategies used by teachers. Journaling has been encouraged at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for over 20 years. It would be a bad idea to require all students to keep learning journals online, or to have them all shared over the Web. However, you might be able to get some volunteer journals, provide them as examples, and encourage those volunteers to create accompanying analyses.
Another approach you might take is to create sets of materials and offer students different ways of approaching learning those materials. Develop systematic assessments, and try to tie the performance to the approach. For example, one week you might have students log on to the Web daily for 30 minutes, and compare their results with logging on for one 2 to 3 hour session during the next week. When did they achieve better learning? (You could incorporate the same strategy for testing the impact of duration of study into a Weblet on a CD-ROM.)
Have students begin some material by going to old exams, as opposed to reading the material first. Do they do better when practice exams precede or follow the exposure to the content?
A narrow focus for self-monitoring gives better results than a broad focus [Shapiro, 1984]. This is a good role for the teacher – to dissect tasks, and focus on their parts. Final assessment in a course may be limited to one grade for each student, or possibly a few paragraphs. There are probably scores of tasks that go into making these assessments. The teacher should focus on students' attention on those tasks that are most productive, cause the most difficulty, or are least appreciated by students, but focus.
Whole-class self-monitoring {U09.05} is a recommended teaching strategy, especially in lower grades. However, applications in higher levels seem reasonable. For example, if participation during asynchronous discussion is required, then having students monitor their own participation makes sense.
One of the hardest things to do with college students is to get them to undertake self-monitoring. In the absence of some serious external intervention, students can muddle along. In fact, even when students can be shown that monitoring improves knowledge of performance, there still can be a problem. Schraw [1994] noted substantial discrepancies between actual performance and knowledge of what works best.
Self-regulation strategies for students should be designed into most Web courses. If you are using a courseware product, for example, there probably are features that provide text and graphical feedback for the student regarding their progress and assessment data for the course (Figure 9.01). Instructing students on the use of these features in the courseware package might also help them monitor their own progress and achievement in the course.