The effectiveness of cognitive and situative instructional approaches to foster self-regulated learning

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Charlotte Dignath
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429624323

Whether students are able to learn effectively depends on their self-regulation of learning (SRL): a cyclical process in which students plan for a task, monitor their performance, and then reflect on the outcome. Students with good SRL strategies attain better learning achievements and are better prepared for a society which requires lifelong learning (e.g. Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994). Children often acquire their learning strategies at relatively young ages, and these strategies tend to be hard to change later-on. This makes it important to teach self-regulation (SR) strategies already to primary school children, yet most research on SR has focused on secondary school children and young adults.A large body of research has shown that SRL can be trained, and which types of SR strategies are best for learning. But only little empirical evidence is available on how learners can be supported in acquiring these SR strategies (Lawson et al. 2018). The acquisition of SR strategies involves 3 ingredients: the students themselves, the teachers, and the instructional approach. Students differ in their cognitive, metacognitive and motivational characteristics: the optimal choice of instruction needs to be tailored to these characteristics. Teachers differ in their prior knowledge, beliefs about SR, self-efficacy regarding SR usage and instruction, as well as their skills in self-regulating their own learning and teaching. Instruction to teachers, and particularly conceptual change, are often needed before teachers are able to effectively instruct SR. Even so, a teacher’s characteristics may continue to affect how (s)he most effectively instructs SR strategies. Regarding the way SR strategies are instructed, one can distinguish between cognitive (direct strategy instruction) vs. situative (indirect) instructional approaches. Cognitive approaches can be either implicit or explicit.The intended contribution of the proposed research is that it will establish how SR can best be taught to students depending on their relevant characteristics, and how teachers can be supported in instructing these skills that are of fundamental importance for effective learning by students. Moreover, the focus will be on primary school age children: a highly relevant but under-studied age group. Moreover, the proposed research integrates findings and methods from three strands of research that are each important for SRL, but which have thus far mostly existed next to each other without being combined or informing each other. These are “pure” research on SRL itself, research on instructional design (i.e. the design of optimal learning environments), and research on teaching competence (i.e. the association between teacher characteristics and their classroom practices). Only by combining all three fields can one come to a full understanding of how SR can be optimally instructed and learnt.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups