Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Loren M. Marulis
Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar
University of Michigan
To appear as: Marulis, L. M., & Palincsar, A. S. (2014). Self-regulated learning. In W. G. Scarlett (Ed).
Classroom Management: An A-to-Z Guide (pp. x-x). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Self-Regulation
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Self-regulation (SR) is a broad concept that comprises a set of interdependent skills and
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complex processes that “enable an individual to guide his/her goal-directed activities over time
and across changing circumstances (contexts)” (Karoly, 1993, p. 25). SR involves deliberately
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recruiting and implementing the skills necessary to control, manage, and plan cognition,
behavior, motivation and affect (e.g., Morrison, Ponitz, & McClelland, 2010; Schunk &
Zimmerman, 1997). SR is traditionally not viewed as a trait or ability, but rather as a self-
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initiated and directed process focused on achieving a particular goal (e.g., waiting one’s turn in a
long line to receive a driver’s license; resisting the temptation to have a second dessert for weight
loss; choosing to study for a test rather than join friends in a social gathering to do well in a
course). Thus, important indicators of SR include: task persistence - particularly in the face of
choices that may be more presently appealing; inhibiting internal and external distractions; and
intentionally, and with control, directing motor actions and attention to an activity.
Classroom teachers, or anyone who has spent time with groups of children, will have
likely anticipated a connection between these types of skills and academic success and indeed the
concept of SR naturally evolved to include individuals’ ability to regulate their cognition,
behavior, motivation and affect specifically to achieve academic goals. As researchers became
interested in the concept of SR and its importance for successful functioning in academic
contexts, a new term appeared: self-regulated learning (SRL) (Corno & Mandinach,1983;
Self-Regulated Learning
The term SRL has been defined in many ways, but generally refers to the active and
independent application of self-regulatory skills (as described above) to a learning task. Most
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classroom teachers have encountered (and appreciated!) self-regulated learners who have been
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described by researchers as students who:
are aware when they know a fact or possess a skill and when they do not. Unlike their
passive classmates, self-regulated students proactively seek out information when needed
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and take necessary steps to master it... Self-regulated learners view acquisition as a
systematic and controllable process, and they accept greater responsibility for their
achievement outcomes (Zimmerman, 1990, p. 4).
Research has shown that self-regulated learners are more likely than other students to:
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have high levels of academic achievement (Pintrich, 2000), employ help seeking strategies in
order to find ways to succeed in school (e.g., Karabenick & Newman, 2006), use more efficient
Hidi & Berndorff, 2002), and have learning orientations and goals based on mastering the
material to be learned rather than simply receiving a high grade (Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990). In a
broad sense, these students are able to be successful despite obstacles that often occur in complex
school settings such as multiple distractions and interruptions, noisy classrooms, or unclear
Analogical reasoning: Brown & Kane, 1988; Mathematics: Desoete, Roeyers, & Huylebroeck,
2006; Reading comprehension: Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Science: White & Frederiksen, 1998;
and Writing: Harris, Graham, Brindle, & Sandmel, 2009). Importantly, children with greater
SRL are more successful academically than children with low SRL, regardless of the presence of
risk factors such as minority status, English language learner status, low parental education, low
family income, single-parent households and maternal depression (Matthews, Kizzie, Rowley, &
Cortina, 2010; Sektnan, McClelland, Acock, & Morrison, 2010). Therefore, SRL can play a
protective and facilitative role for children at risk of learning difficulties. Furthermore, as many
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teachers have experienced, students with greater SRL are not only easier to manage, facilitating a
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classroom environment conducive to greater learning, but also allow for less time to be spent on
discipline and on the teaching of rules and behavioral skills allowing increased time to be spent
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on academic activities.
As previously recognized, there are few contexts that are more complex than a classroom.
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At a minimum, as Figure 1 suggests, teachers are managing curricula (across subject matter and
topics) and materials (e.g., texts, digital tools, manipulatives), interpersonal relationships, and the
cognitive demands integral to achieving identified academic goals. While there is leverage
gained by attending to any one of these gears, successful classroom management, and enhanced
learning, results from the meshing of each gear; furthermore, the primary “driver” of the
interaction should be the management of cognitive demands to advance productive teaching and
learning.
Initial studies of SR primarily addressed the issue of managing cognitive demands; as
research on SR matured, there was greater attention to the larger context in which cognitive
demand must be managed. In this section, we illustrate the progression of this work for the
purpose of helping educators consider how research on SR can support their efforts. We begin by
In the late 1970s and 1980s there was considerable interest in the role that engaging
also referred to as “private speech,” is speech that is not for the purpose of communicating with
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others, but rather for the purpose of directing one’s own activity. For example, Meichenbaum
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(1977) studied the application of self-verbalization to task-completion. Learners were taught,
through modeling, to: define the problem (e.g., “What is it I have to do?”), focus attention, (e.g.,
“I need to pay attention to what I am doing.”), plan their activity (e.g., “I need to look at all the
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options before making my choice.”), self-reinforce (e.g., “I’m doing fine.”), and make coping
statements (e.g., “I need to try again when I don’t get it right.”). Self-verbalization has also been
successfully used to support students to rehearse information by modeling and practicing the
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activity of breaking the information to be learned into smaller parts and practicing repeating the
information to be learned (e.g., a set of vocabulary terms, formulae, or dates). Research on the
systematic in their learning activity (Hallahan, Kneedler, & Lloyd, 1983), and helps learners who
tend to be impulsive (Schunk, 1985); however, self-verbalization adds another layer onto a task
and can distract learners who do not, in fact, need this form of support (Denney, 1975).
In the 1980s, the research on self-verbalization took a cognitive turn, in the sense that
instruction was less on behaviors (such as impulse control, or repeated practice) and more on
example, think-aloud research (e.g., Bereiter & Bird, 1985) in which competent readers shared
their thinking as they read, suggested that competent readers took control of their activity while
reading by: predicting what they would read, paraphrasing the information they were learning,
and occasionally monitoring how well they were understanding. This research informed the
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focus of teaching for self-regulated reading. For example, Reciprocal Teaching, designed to
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improve the reading achievement of struggling readers, focuses on teaching students to:
summarize by identifying and integrating key ideas in the text, use prior knowledge and ideas in
the text to predict upcoming content in the text, identify the kinds of questions that the text is
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answering while reading (i.e., self-question), and stop to clarify when they find text confusing.
Borrowing from the self-verbalization research described above, these four strategies are taught
in the context of a discussion with the teacher, in the course of which, the teacher models expert
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use of these four strategies, supports the students to enlist the use of these strategies as they read
and learn from text, and transfers increasing responsibility for leading the discussion as the
students become more competent with the independent use of these strategies (Palincsar &
Brown, 1984).
Kirschner, 1989) also drew upon studies of expertise. For example, the research of Flower and
Hayes (1980) revealed the strategies that skilled writers employed to assist them with setting
goals for their writing and determining the content and organization of that writing. Raphael and
Englert and their colleagues attended to these processes in the development of their writing
organizing, drafting, editing, and revising. However, these think-sheets are not designed to be
completed independently by young writers, but rather serve to support the teacher in modeling
each process, and to provide students guided practice so that they can independently engage in
these processes.
The “tool” metaphor has commonly been used in the instructional literature to refer to
teaching students strategies that enable SR. The research is clear that, when done well, strategy
instruction can, indeed, help students to become actively engaged in learning activity and
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transfer the stratgy to independent use. What does it mean to do strategy instruction well? It
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means that students are introduced to and practice the use of tools in the context of challenging
academic tasks; it means that the expert use of the tools is modeled for the student, and that the
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student is provided support (also referred to as coaching) to learn how to apply these tools
effectively. It also means that the students are provided opportunities to practice the use of the
tools and to experience for themselves how taking a strategic approach enables them to become
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illustrate: reading strategies may be presented in isolation from reading for meaning, as happens,
for example, when students are asked to complete a journal entry generating a series of questions
from a text, but are never held accountable to answering those questions or justifying their
answers with information in the text. Students may be put in small groups to muddle through the
process of writing summaries without any instruction about the process of summarizing. They
may be asked to draw a picture in their heads with a piece of text that is poorly matched with the
strategy of visualizing. For all these reasons, and because a focus on process is vulnerable to the
criticism that it detracts from a focus on content, there is interest in alternative approaches to
teaching for SR that attend—in a more balanced way—to both learning processes and content.
We have selected three programs from preschool through late elementary school to illustrate
such an approach: Tools of the Mind (Bodrova & Leong, 1996, 2007), Fostering a Community of
Learners (FCL, Brown & Campione, 1990; 1994) and Concept Oriented Reading Instruction
(CORI, Guthrie, Klauda, & Ho, 2013; Guthrie, Wigfield, & VonSecher, 2000).
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Children who enter formal schooling without adequate self-regulatory skills are at
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significantly greater risk for difficulties, including low levels of academic achievement
(McClelland, Morrison, & Holmes, 2000). Though they are limited, there are interventions and
curricula designed to enhance children's SR—in the contextualized way that we have endorsed—
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prior to formal school entry. One such program is the Tools of the Mind preschool and
kindergarten program by Bodrova and Leong (1996, 2007). Tools of the Mind (Tools) uses
developmentally appropriate problem-solving strategies within the context of dramatic play and
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academic content areas as a primary source of deliberately promoting, facilitating, and teaching
which posits that social interactions enhance children’s learning and development and allow
learners to become more independent or gain greater SR. Further, this theory emphasizes the use
of mental “tools” (which can be as simple as learning to use lists as memory enhancers) to
intentionally increase SRL across, and within, content areas. For example, teachers scaffold
children in writing explicit plans for their dramatic play, specifying not only what they are going
to do but also what role they will take so that the play becomes more complex and self-
regulatory and is more likely to enhance SR and related metaskills (e.g., Whitebread, &
O’Sullivan, 2012) Moreover, the teachers facilitate children in regulating the recorded
representation of their play plans (i.e., recording their plan in a representational way that may
entail drawing, conventional writing or anything in between depending on the child’s capability)
thus further situating the instruction in literacy. Tools instruction includes similar activities
geared toward promoting SR in other content areas, such as mathematics (e.g., Word Problems)
so that children learn how to apply SR skills across domains. Research on Tools has shown that
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teachers who have been trained to use the Tools curriculum were rated as having better
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classroom management than those not trained in Tools (Barnett et al., 2008; Diamond, Barnett,
Thomas, & Munro, 2007). These studies also indicated that Tools may even positively increase
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mathematics and language skills in preschoolers, though more research is needed in this area.
outstanding example of an educational reform effort that, while having its roots in teaching for
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SR, illustrates—and accommodates—the dynamic that we framed in Figure 1. The FCL curricula
are organized around thematic units; for example, biological themes include interdependence and
adaptation; and environmental science themes include balance, competition, and cooperation.
With respect to materials, students in FCL classrooms have access to a broad array of material to
support their inquiry about the themes, including: text, video, and a computer environment in
which children correspond with one another, as well as with expert consultants. The
interpersonal relationships in FCL are managed with the use collaborative learning arrangements,
using both Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) and the jigsaw method (Aronson,
Bridgeman, & Geffner, 1978) in which children are assigned part of the topic of study to learn
and subsequently to teach to others; hence becoming expert relative to different aspects of the
topic under study and then sharing their expertise with their peers.
In FCL, instruction is designed to support an active role for the learners, who are
encouraged to assume control of their activity and be reflective in the process. The issue of
transfer, or the capacity and inclination to apply learning in novel contexts, is central to FCL.
Brown and Campione proposed that integral to promoting transfer in the classroom are
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the more general processes useful to advancing new and continued learning. Such understanding
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would enable students to talk knowingly about these processes, as well as to use them flexibly.
These tenets implied that instruction must first of all be about the task of mastering a rich domain
of knowledge. In addition, instruction in this rich domain must include modeling that is designed
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to help students acquire the critical thinking and reflection activities that will guide their thinking
as they undertake this learning in these new areas of learning. Finally, in the spirit of the work on
self-verbalization that we presented earlier, Brown and Campione urged that students be
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provided with many occasions for explaining to others (and hence to themselves) the
characteristics and limitations of what they are learning, and the reasons they are engaged in
particular learning activities. Research on FCL has supported these tenets; participants in FCL
The FCL research resonates with findings obtained in the research on CORI. Guthrie et
al., 2004), suggested that students who have sustained opportunities to read interesting texts for
the purpose of advancing content knowledge related to a particular theme (e.g., animal habitats),
were more motivated to read and more strategic in their reading than were students who were
provided strategy instruction in reading. These researchers determined that, when content goals
(such as learning science) were salient to students, rather than performance goals (such as getting
a good grade), students showed increased motivation for reading, increased strategic behavior,
Guiding Principles
Research in classrooms has identified classroom and learning characteristics that are
consistently associated with greater levels of SRL in even very young (i.e., preschool) students.
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These characteristics include: allowing children to regulate their learning through choosing their
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own goals and levels of challenge and doing self-evaluation (e.g., Perry, 1998; Winne &
Hadwin, 1998) and encouraging both children and teachers to articulate and discuss their
reasoning and problem-solving (e.g., Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Whitebread et al., 2007).
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Furthermore, research in classrooms has shown that certain types of instructional practices are
most effective for facilitating SRL. These practices include: explicit teaching and modeling of
SRL strategies, including explicit feedback that links increased performance with specific
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the support (i.e., external regulation) provided by the teacher so that the students begin to
Schmitz, & Buchbinder, 2009; Hattie et al., 1996). Finally, though small-group participation
structures tend to be particularly beneficial for enhancing SRL (e.g., Whitebread et al., 2007),
whole-group instruction can also be facilitative of SRL when it provides independent and group
Coltman, 2007), and a supportive environment where risk-taking is encouraged and errors are
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