Abstract
Self-regulation of learning (SRL) positively affects achievement and motivation. Therefore, teachers are supposed to foster students‘ SRL by providing them with strategies. However, two preconditions have to be met: teachers need to diagnose their students‘ SRL to take instructional decisions about promoting SRL. To this end, teachers need knowledge about SRL to know what to diagnose. Only little research has investigated teachers’ knowledge about SRL and its assessment yet. Thus, the aim of this study was to identify teachers’ conceptions about SRL, to investigate their ideas about how to diagnose their students’ SRL, and to test relationships between both. To this end, we developed two systematic coding schemes to analyze the conceptions about SRL and the ideas about assessing SRL in the classroom among a sample of 205 teachers. The coding schemes for teachers’ open answers were developed based on models about SRL and were extended by deriving codes from the empirical data, and produced satisfying interrater reliability (conceptions about SRL: κ= .85, SE = .03; ideas about assessing SRL: κ= .63, SE = .05). The results showed that many teachers did not refer to any regulation procedure at all and described SRL mainly as student autonomy and self-directedness. Only few teachers had a comprehensive conception of the entire SRL cycle. We identified three patterns of teachers’ conceptualizations of SRL: a motivation-oriented, an autonomy-oriented, and a regulation-oriented conceptualization of SRL. Regarding teachers’ ideas about assessing their students’ SRL, teachers mainly focused on cues that are not diagnostic of SRL. Yet, many teachers knew about portfolios to register SRL among students. Finally, our results suggest that, partly, teachers’ ideas about assessing SRL varied as a function of their SRL concept: teachers with an autonomy-oriented conceptualization of SRL were more likely to use cues that are not diagnostic of SRL, such as unsystematic observation or off-task behavior. The results provide insights into teachers‘ conceptions of SRL and of its assessment. Implications for future research in the field of SRL will be drawn; in particular, about how to support teachers in diagnosing and fostering SR among their students.
Highlights
Self-regulating one’s learning has proven to be an important skill for lifelong learning (Hattie and Yates, 2013; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2014) that children should learn from early on in order to develop a functional and effective learning behavior rather than developing their own, inefficient, strategies by trial and error that tend to be difficult to change later on (e.g., Alexander et al, 1995)
Self-regulation of learning (SRL)1 has been regarded as a competence suitable for older learners (e.g., Veenman et al, 2006), recent educational developments, such as the implementation of digital learning environments, in particular due to school closures in the scope of the SARSCoV-2 pandemic, have noticeably shown how important it is that even young learners are able to self-regulate their learning
The remaining 25% of the teachers did described neither metacognitive activities on an abstract level nor more precise regulation activities that were coded as part of the self-regulation of learning (SRL) cycle
Summary
Self-regulating one’s learning has proven to be an important skill for lifelong learning (Hattie and Yates, 2013; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2014) that children should learn from early on in order to develop a functional and effective learning behavior rather than developing their own, inefficient, strategies by trial and error that tend to be difficult to change later on (e.g., Alexander et al, 1995). Research of the last decades has illustrated that SRL can already be found in very young learners (e.g., Whitebread and Neale, 2020) and that even primary school children can already benefit from strategy training to foster SRL (e.g., Dignath et al, 2008). Educators need to have a clear conceptualization of SRL in order to promote self-regulatory strategies in their classroom (Boekaerts, 1999). Based on this conceptualization, they need to assess how self-regulated each individual student is and which students need which type of support in order to foster SRL adaptively (Dignath and Veenman, 2020)
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