Modern theories of cognitive and constructive learning portray students as agents who set and pursue goals. More effective students select among cognitive tactics they use to approach goals and learn from false starts and setbacks. These students self-regulate not merely performance but also how they learn. How do students develop forms for self-regulating learning? The author suggests they experiment thereby bootstrapping newer forms of self-regulated learning from prior forms. Experimenting is an arduous way to build knowledge and it is subject to at least 3 obstacles that may be especially troublesome for young students: obtaining sufficient practice with appropriate feedback, remembering how learning was enacted, and reasoning about factors that affect learning. The author examines these issues and suggests needs for future research that investigates how students develop forms of complex goal-directed cognition that guide learning. Parents and caregivers will readily affirm that even the youngest students have a will and exercise it, sometimes with too much volition, when they explore and learn. When students adapt their approaches to learning, learning is considered self-regulated. Self-regulated learning (SRL) is implicit in many of educational psychology's contemporary topics, including cognitive strategies, learning-to-learn, and lifelong learning. Some researchers (e.g., see Schunk & Zimmerman, 1994), including myself, credit SRL as constitutive of success in learning, problem solving, transfer, and academic success in general. I (Winne, 1995) recently reviewed research to highlight two relatively neglected attributes of SRL. First, SRL is not always deliberate, complex, and metacognitive. Like other skills, SRL can reach a level of expertise at which it is enacted in automatic and simple form. Second, SRL is grounded in and expressive of deeply seated knowledge, skills, and beliefs integrated over an idiosyncratic history with learning experiences. At a particular time, a student's present state of history might be likened to a personal paradigm for learning, that is, a framework of concepts that characterize what learning is, methods for carrying it out, and what it is for. I used these two attributes as premises in drawing a controversial inference: Students do not learn to be self-regulating—SRL is inherent in goal-directed engagement