Self-regulated learning has to be taught
 | Friday November 5th Danny Kostons defends his PhD thesis at the Open Universiteit in Heerlen. His research focuses on the question how to help students to acquire self-regulated learning skills. |
Study house
Around 2000 secondary education in the Netherlands introduced a nationwide educational innovation that relies heavily on self-regulated learning (the study house). Studies of the effects of self-regulated learning have shown that providing learners with the opportunity to regulate their learning may indeed have beneficial effects on their motivation and involvement. However, learning outcomes with self-regulated learning are often similar or, in the cases of novices, inferior to those achieved with non-personalized instruction.
Learn self-regulated learning skills
Kostons investigated in four experiments how learners assess their own performance and how they select their next learning tasks, and whether training learners' self-assessment and task-selection skills could enhance the accuracy of those skills, and subsequently improve the effectiveness of their self-regulated learning.
Simpel interventions are effective
His experiments show that a relatively simple training interventions can enhance accuracy of self-assessment and task-selection skills and significantly increase learning outcomes of self-regulated learning. An example of such a simple interventions: make learners watch a good example. Show them how somebody executes a task, assesses his performance and selects a new task. Afterwards they are more capable to assess their own performance and choose an appropriate task and the learning results of ther self-regulated learning are significantly higher than the results of learners who did not watch the example.
Danny Kostons (Maastricht, 1980) defends his PhD titled On the role of self-assessment and task-selection skills in self-regulated learning on Friday 5tn November 2010 at 16.00 hours at the Open Universiteit in Heerlen.
For more information, see the press release (in Dutch).
