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Building Together to Promote Students' Self-Regulated Learning in Primary and Secondary Education

Fri, April 12, 3:05 to 4:35pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 5, Salon B

Abstract

Objectives

Being able to plan, monitor, and regulate one's learning activities increases the chances of success for children and young people throughout their school career (Dent & Koenka, 2015). These insights have led to an increasing focus in education on promoting self-regulated learning (SRL). Research shows, however, that available scientific knowledge about the effective promotion of SRL hardly finds its way to classroom practice (Greene, 2021). Therefore, in this project teachers, educators, and researchers join forces to iteratively engage in the design-oriented development, implementation, and evaluation of evidence-informed solutions to SRL-related problems.


Theoretical framework:

Review studies show that interventions that effectively contribute to students' acquiring SRL strategies involve an integrated approach in which cognitive, metacognitive, motivational and behavioral SRL strategies are explicitly instructed (Graham & Perin, 2007). However, several studies show that this barely takes place in primary and secondary education (Dignath & Veenman, 2021). Therefore, in this study design teams of teachers, educators, and researchers collaboratively work on the development of practical interventions to realize integrative and explicit SRL-promoting didactics. At the same time, we conduct overarching research addressing the following question: How can teachers develop and implement interventions aimed at supporting students in developing and activating SRL in the context of a design team? 


Methods

Within this research, five design teams are formed consisting of a researcher, an educator, and five to six teachers from different primary or secondary schools in The Netherlands. Each design team conducts design and action-oriented research around a chosen SRL-theme in two cycles during a period of two schoolyears (22/23 and 23/24). We collect data per design group by administering student and teacher questionnaires (pre- and post) to gain insight into SRL development. In addition, we conduct timeline-interviews with design group members to gain insight into working principles for effective SRL-promotion in differing contexts. This method involves that the participants of each design team are asked to provide their narrative of a particular cycle by reflecting on the relevant artefacts, products and data they have generated using a timeline as conversation tool.


Results

Based on our first analyses of the results obtained from the timeline-interviews of the design teams in the first cycle of our research, three conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, several conditions for implementing effective SRL-instruction need to be in place in primary as well as secondary education. For instance, even though teachers consider SRL-instruction crucial for students' academic achievement and learning, they mention that they need more time, knowledge, and skills to engage in collaborative design of evidence-informed SRL-promoting interventions. Secondly, teachers highly appreciated the work in design teams as a means to share practices, gain insight into activities of colleagues and collectively reflect on SRL-teaching. Finally, teachers valued that they could examine SRL more in depth and became increasingly conscious of the importance of providing explicit SRL-instruction.

This research bridges educational research and practice by collaboratively engaging in developing, implementing, and evaluating evidence-informed ways to stimulate SRL of students in primary and secondary education.

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