Self-Regulated Learning

Danielle Yu

With the COVID-19 surge, many students found themselves at home and away from the hustle and bustle environment of school. For those motivated by the stress of peers and tests, the comfort of open-book tests and lectures in pajamas were both welcoming and terrifying. The sudden urge to forego lectures for recordings and depend on open-book tests was tempting. Instead of extrinsic motivation from faculty and friends, students had to rise to the challenge of self-regulated learning.

What is self-regulated learning? In a short and crass explanation, self-regulated learning is the art of knowing and controlling how to care. In a more convoluted explanation, self-regulated learning can be described as “a cyclical process, wherein the student plans for a task, monitors their performance, and then reflects on the outcome.”¹ Once learners can utilize self-regulated learning, it often indicates that andragogy, or adult teaching, can be applied to the population. In higher education, instructional design and methods typically assume that students have achieved self-regulated learning. Despite this assumption, students are rarely taught how to self-regulate their learning. Therefore, if tasked with teaching self-regulation, educators must be self-regulated learners themselves as well as advocators for this learning method.

Self-regulated learning depends on three important aspects: cognition, metacognition, and motivation.² Cognition includes skills that are essential for memorizing and recalling information as well as problem-solving strategies and critical thinking. In adults, cognition can be taught by having learners create questions about the assigned topic or engaging in a classroom debate. Metacognition depends on declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge. Declarative knowledge is knowing about oneself as a learner while procedural knowledge is about how to accomplish a task. Lastly, conditional knowledge emphasizes when to use acquired knowledge in a setting and understanding why you are using that knowledge. Motivation, although it sounds self-explanatory, is a complex element of realizing the degree of confidence in finishing a task while also understanding the nature of the knowledge being learned.

There are many instructional models to teach self-regulated learning including the Zimmerman, Boekaerts, Winne and Hadwin, Pintrich, Efklides as well as Hadwin, Jarvel, and Miller.³ To many, this is a list of useless words and names. Although there is some truth to that statement, the outcome of these instructional models is the development of self-regulating learning. Each instructional method is unique in their approach, but the general layout of each model includes a forethought phase, a performance phase, followed by self-reflection. Educators can take advantage of these models and utilize them to the benefit of the students.

Self-regulating learning does not mean learning or struggling alone. In fact, one of the most important aspects of self-regulating learning is feedback, both from the learner and the educator. Feedback provides insight for a student about their current performance and how it compares to their desired achievements. At first, feedback may initially start with the educator, but as leaners become self-regulating, they will learn the ability to assess their performance, generate internal feedback, and monitor their progress. To give effective feedback for self-regulating students, educators can exemplify how to solve a problem, encourage motivational beliefs and behaviors as well as provide opportunities to help the student reach their desired performance level.

Anyone can be a learner, but it takes conditioning and setting your mind to become a good student. Working hard is, as you would expect, hard at times. Becoming a self-regulated learner allows students to motivate themselves, adapt to teaching strategies, and set their own goals and expectations. In the end, this will contribute to an individual’s identity as a life-long learner, which every pharmacist has fated themselves to be by entering the profession. Overall, self-regulated learning should be taught and utilized by educators to inspire intrinsic motivation and prepare future pharmacists for the profession.

References

1.    What is self-regulated learning? Develop Self-Regulated Learners. https://serc.carleton.edu/sage2yc/self_regulated/what.html . Published June 8, 2017.

2.    Self-regulated learning. LINCS Adult Education and Literacy. https://lincs.ed.gov/sites/default/files/3_TEAL_Self%20Reg%20Learning.pdf.

3.    Panadero E. A Review of Self-regulated Learning: Six Models and Four Directions for Research. Front Psychol. 2017 Apr 28;8:422. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00422. PMID: 28503157; PMCID: PMC5408091.