Equitable Learning: SRL Instruction for All Students

Have you ever studied very hard and long for a test, but then still bombed it! You are not alone!

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is the development of the metacognition of learning, in other words knowing how to study. It is rare to learn SRL skills in formal classrooms, but students are expect to have sufficient skills in SRL at the university level. The reality is they do not without explicit SRL instruction. Through an online platform students can improve their SRL either individually or through a whole class adoption by a teacher or school. This platform is unique in that no other commercially available online tool provides all of the components of SRL development according to Zimmerman (2000): goal setting, planning, monitoring, and evaluating. By providing SRL development for colegio level students, we can reduce the attrition rates from university classes by academically capable students that lack SRL. 

Sel-Regulated Learning (SRL), the metacognition of learning, is correlated with higher academic achievement because success explicit SRL instruction leads to increased motivation and academic achievement especially in middle school aged children (Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990; Zimmerman 1990; Zimmerman 2008; Cleary & Zimmerman, 2004). SRL is not connected with intelligence level. All students are capable of learning SRL to become effective and efficient in their learning strategies (Zimmerman, 2002). Since SRL is a “developable aptitude,” Winne (1996) advocates that all students should receive SRL, the metacognition of learning in addition to content instruction (p330).

The first exposure to SRL is provided by their parents and home life. Students with lower socioeconomic status (SES) enter schools with poor SRL skills because parents lack SRL skills, the ability to transfer, or adequate time and resources. Teachers rarely teach SRL explicitly because it is often not included in the content curriculum or the teachers lack the skills, tools, and instructional time to teach SRL. Without explicit SRL instruction, many low SES students are at risk for underachievement and failure in the future, especially in their university years when the content is more difficult with less individual support available (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Milner, 2012).

SRL is an informal process that is based on the individual and their previous experiences. Because of the individualized nature of SRL, it is challenging for these skills to be developed in the formal education setting of the classroom. Thus we aim to create an adaptive learning online environment that enables to students to engage in the three phases of SRL according to Zimmerman: goal setting, planning, monitoring and evaluating. This program is based on other models in the United States and in Spain. The online tool engages students in the goal setting process, suggests best study strategies to achieve those goals based on inputs from personalized data received from initial learning questionnaires, and enables students to track their progress both through their quantitative performance and self-efficacy in their content mastery. The online tool provides feedback to students through the use of graphs that can show students the impacts and effects of different study strategies on their performance. The process is iterative in nature, so that after students evaluate their performance, they then create new learning goals based on their previous performance. Students can use this platform individually or teachers can adopt it for their class. 

At this time there are no comprehensive apps, programs, or software available within the market that enables the development of SRL in either the classroom or for individual learners that includes all the components of SRL development according to Zimmerman (2000).  The research indicates that SRL interventions require extensive training of teachers and a commitment of time in the curriculum. Additionally, SRL development is often not included in the curriculum of core subjects with teachers having little time to provide instruction on such skills. There are a few internet-based tools, but many of these focus on only one aspect of the SRL Model as outlined by Zimmerman (2000) except the Metacognitive Learning Organizer (MLO) by Manso-Vasquez and Llamas-Nistal (2015) of Spain is not yet internationally commercially available. 

This SRL platform provides the structure for students to be independent learners and to develop their SRL knowledge and skills for themselves as individuals. By creating additional curriculum and teacher guides, it can be scaled up from the individual student user to whole classes or schools. As an Internet-based organizational tool that works with individual student’s motivation, learning style, academic goals, and learning needs to recommend strategies specific to their context and guide students to reflect and evaluate on their learning process, teachers will be able to focus more on their lessons by simply encouraging or possibly requiring students to check into their SRL accounts and update their goals, learning plans, and reflection on their performance. 

The platform will have a total of 8 modules that will have the ability to communicate and transfer information between each other. The 8 modules include the following: Goal Setting, Student Profile, Time Management, Learning Strategies, Learning Analytics, Semantics, Learning Pathways, and Social Connections. The 8 modules all connect back to features of SRL theory promoted by Zimmerman (2000) and integrate components of the planning, monitoring, and evaluating the process of metacognition growth and development for SRL. Given the complexity of the platform, it is extremely important to have an understanding of the interactions between the modules prior to the building of the platform from a theoretical point of view. There is a necessity for this grant to provide funding to hire computer programmers to create the coding necessary to ensure that all modules function properly and communicate well with the different components. With this platform and complementary curriculum, individual students or whole classes can develop SRL.

Many tools have been created that guide students to create goals, manage time, or reflect on performance through quizzes, but not one technological innovation exists that integrates all three components of the SRL Model. Here is a quick review of some of the most comparable tools, none of which are commercially available on an international level and includes all aspects of SRL.

Responsive Open Learning Environments (ROLE), a platform developed in 2010 by a collaboration among six EU countries and China, develops SRL skills for individual learners through the use of isolated widgets (ROLE Consortium, 2013). These widgets include a learning planner, a learning activity recommender, a time manager, and student activity tracker. The widgets work in isolation of each other, which requires tasks multiple entries of the same content in the different widgets. The Home Page of iGoogle to E-learning (Pi2E) was another project that utilized the use of widgets based on the now extinct iGoogle environment (Gonzalez-Tato, Llama-Nistal, Caeiro-Rodriguez, and Alvarez-Osuna 2012). It intended to help students develop and use learning plans so that students could see a list of personalized study activities.

         One of the more recently developed learning organization tools, the Metacognitive Learning Organizer (MLO) by Manso-Vasquez and Llamas-Nistal (2015) operates through the use of interconnected modules. These modules provide all of the integral phases of SRL development according to Zimmerman (2000), planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Unfortunately, MLO, the most comprehensively designed tool to date, is not yet commercially available and was developed in Spain.

Through use of this online program students will develop all three of the subcomponents of metacognition:

1. Knowing oneself as a learner the factors that influence performance (declarative knowledge)

2. Knowing strategies for learning (procedural knowledge)

3.Knowing when and why to use particular strategies. 

Through the use of the platform, students create academic goals and receive recommendations for learning strategies based on the goals as well as inputs of their learner profile. The learner profile is created by completion of surveys that determine the students' different learning modalities, motivation style, and current self-regulated learning score. Students receive feedback based on inputs of their performance that is correlated with other inputs regarding the strategies and methods of used. 

Numerous studies have shown that SRL is correlated with higher academic achievement (Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990; Zimmerman 1990; Zimmerman 2008).In a study that assigned students to receive an SRL intervention related to a math course, those in the experimental group receiving the SRL intervention had a 25% higher pass rate on a national gateway math exam than the control without the treatment. Additionally, these students that received explicit SRL instruction, demonstrated high self-efficacy beliefs in their ability to solve problems and were also able to self-evaluate their performance more accurately (Zimmerman, Moylan, Hudesman, White, & Flugman, 2011).  

In summary metacognition instruction leads to effective and efficient learning strategies that improve the academic performance and increases self-efficacy to create motivated learners. Long term impacts include reduced attrition rates.

Currently in my role as coordinator for the Centro de Exito para Ciencias we manage support services for students such as resources rooms with tutoring and reinforcement programs for students at risk of attrition of basic science courses. I also am the professor of the introduction ciencias course, which is required for all students in their first semester for the new curriculum reform. This platform would be available to all students at Uniandes with an attempt to help them develop their SRL skills. This would include more than a 150 students at Uniandes within the first year. 

We will also offer the program through our networks of Colegios in Bogotá. Currently we have contracts with Gimnasio Moderno and are developing additional contracts. We could also offer the platform as a possible continuing education course at Uniandes for colegio level students. We would also advertise through the regional networks of Uniandes to expand this offering to students in rural areas or low socioeconomic status urban areas. 

Within 5 years we would have the goal for exposure to all students majoring within the School of Science at Uniandes. Additionally we would anticipate several 100s of students from the regions with several 100s more of students participating within our current networks such as Gimnasio Moderno. After 5 years it could easily be approximately 2000 total students have accessed and used the platform at some point in their academic career. 

It is anticipated that this project will require 3 years to develop the platform using research methods throughout the 3 years to guide the process. The first year is dedicated for the programming and creation of the platform. During this first year, data from the introduction science course and projects with partner colegios can be used to build the library of key words for tag recognition and the library of learning strategies. After the first year it is expected there will need to be piloting and testing of the platform first for inclusion of accuracy and representation of the appropriate key words in the tag recogniton, but also in the understanding of how students interact with the platform through think aloud studies. The think aloud studies will allow improvements to be made to the platform, so that it is as user friendly intuitive as possible for students.After this initial phase of testing the usability and feasibility of the platform, additional modifications will need to be made and will occur in the third year of the project with additional think aloud studies and usabilities research. 

In the 4th year it is anticipated that an official pilot could be done to determine the impacts of learning by measuring the changes in SRL score through MSLQ and think aloud protocols, and normalized gains in scores of students that used the platform compared to students from previous years that did not for target introductory science courses at Uniandes and science courses at collaborating schools. 

For this project one successful there are 4 main barriers:

1. The main barrier is financial to fund this project through completion. Funding is primarily needed for the development of the tool itself, as Uniandes has the infrastructure to market the tool. 

2. Another barrier is the actual technological development of the tool. This online platform has several different modules that are collecting and processing information and must then link and communicate with the other modules. For example the goal setting module of the programming must receive the goals from the students and communicate those goals to the strategy recommender so that through tag recognition of key words in the goals, specific strategies can be suggested to the students. 

3. We must build a robust library of strategies and key words for the tag recognition aspects of the online tool. 

4. We will need to provide sustainable support to rural areas or urban areas with limited resources and accessibility to computers or tablets, as well as internet usage. 

The first three barriers are all addressed through continuous application for grants and funding to continue to fund the development of the tool. It will required the salary of a programmer. Additionally, it will take time to fully develop the library of strategies and key word tag recognition programming capabilities. It will require testing possible inputs. However due to access to students in the introduction science course each semester, mock exercises in SRL development can be used to help build those strategies and key words for the tag recognition. 

The fourth and final barrier is perhaps the most difficult. It will require partnering with communities to guarantee the sustainability of the programs in schools by providing school sets of computers or tablets and providing adequate internet service. 

Not currently being implemented.

Currently there is a huge market for this kind of product. Many schools including Uniandes are investing time, energy, and money to develop programs to reduce attrition rates in the sciences and provide more content support. Unfortunately I have yet to hear anyone discuss the need for self-regulated learning programs, with the emphasis solely on content. Thus this tool is useful for my immediate community, my students in the school of science at Uniandes, but can be shared with the greater community including those at the colegio level.

We have many with the decanatura that would assist with components of this project, as are a team that works on many projects for the school of science.  In total the decanatura has 16 people in the office, but not all would contribute. They would only be assisting and not considered full time. Stephanie Toro would be considered the lead on this project with occasional help from team members of the decanatura. In addition to this people Stephanie has 2 assistants that are part time. We also would hire a person to work full time on the programming. 

Dr. Stephanie Toro is a teacher and an education researcher. She has been a science teacher for 18 years, teaching middle school, high school, and university level science classes. She also served as a middle school department chair. As a teacher, Stephanie was known to be one of the few that integrated the teaching of SRL skills into her classroom and as such, it made her very popular among students and parents, as well as be recongized as the Houston Science Teacher of the Year in 2016. With a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction, she has background knowledge and experience in conducting educational research particularly with quantitative or a mixed methods approach. She also has worked as a research and innovations director with Academic Independence, LLC, an organization that provides self-regulated learning training to students outside of the classroom. She now works at the university level conducting various educational research projects that include developing SRL and metacognition skills in students. Specifically she coaches many professors at Uniandes on teaching and learning methods that include SRL through a 10 month reflective teaching program for professors in the school of Science. She also has contracts and works with local colegios, providing professional development to science and math teachers. Stephanie’s experience in the classroom and as a researcher adds a different perspective to this project.

I am a professor in the decanatura of the Facultad de Ciencias at the Universidad de los Andes. Thus this would be a project we would use to improve student learning at the university and within our regional networks. 

Below is a Logic Model for Program Evaluation (because this is not a business).

Inputs

• Computers/ iPads/ other technology

• Pedagogical support from experts such as Stephanie Toro and research assistants and some support from select members of the decanatura

• Technology Team for Platform design, development, and trouble-shooting

Outputs: Activities 

• Development Study during years 1-3 which includes usability and feasibility testing

• Pilot Study (year 4) for potential impacts

Outputs: Participations- Who Is Involved

• • Development Study
    

    • Students in the Introduction Science course at Uniandes

  • Pilot Study 

    • Students in the Introduction Science course at Uniandes and other participating students from colegios in Bogota and the regional network

Direct Products

• Creation of the online SRL Platform

• Research data regarding the usability, feasibility, and the measured impacts on student learning

Outcomes 

Short Term

• Develop and Improve the online platform for future dissemination to a larger audience at the school level or even district level

• Improve the usability and feasibility of the platform through testing and data collection with sample audiences at Uniandes

• Improve the reliability and validity of interview protocols to assess the academic impact

Intermediate

• Improve students assessment scores and academic performance for the semester/year specifically for populations of students that are low SES, varied learning differences, and/or minority populations

• Improve students self regulated learning skills specifically for populations of students that are low SES, varied learning differences, and/or minority population

Long Term:

• Improve students’ self-efficacy and motivations as self regulated learners 

• Improve students’ academic performance and assessment scores ongoing as life long learners 

We would adopt a low income business model. 

Once the platform is created it is estimated that costs would be greatly reduced with only the need for maintenance and support as necessary. 

Access to the platform will be free for all students of the school of science, as part of their enrollment in the introduction science course. Additionally access would be given free to students of low income that do not have the resources to afford access. 

We will continue to provide consultancy and training to teachers at colegios and other institutions for a fee. Also colegios and institutions that are not considered low SES will be required to pay for access through an institutionalized account purchase option. Through this income we can support the platform and any necessary maintenance.