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Why Teach Self-Regulation in Secondary Education?
Level 4: Generalizing
• Independently creates a plan (detailed set of actions) for short- and long-term aspirations, then monitors progress and effort, adjusts as needed, and reflects • Self-regulates in multiple settings related to various situations (such as longterm projects, personal goals, and career development) • Reflects on strengths, challenges, efforts, and outcomes related to selfregulation in specific situations • Identifies connections between self-regulation and other intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies
Source: © 2018 by Amy Gaumer Erickson and Patricia Noonan. Used with permission. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/SEL for a free reproducible version of this table.
WHAT TEACHERS SAY
—Vickie, English language arts teacher
As Rick H. Hoyle and Amy L. Dent (2018) write:
For over a century, leaders in education policy and practice have argued that a primary purpose of formal schooling is teaching students how to learn. This purpose is achieved when students can self-regulate their learning, which transforms the acquisition of knowledge and skills into an active, autonomous process. (p. 49)
This book is designed to support you in teaching middle and high school students the components of self-regulation as well as provide resources for authentic classroom practice with feedback tied to course activities that are already in place. Ongoing practice can be embedded into any course, any extracurricular activity, and any life experience. When all educators in a school facilitate practice in self-regulation, student responsibility becomes ingrained in the school culture.
Students who apply self-regulation strategies perform better in school, as evidenced by both grade point average and standardized state assessments (Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 2014). In fact, Nancy Frey, John Hattie, and Douglas Fisher (2018), through the method of meta-analysis, find that metacognitive strategies “such as planning, monitoring, and regulating the learning process” (p. 14) produce a high effect size of 0.69 with regard to student achievement (Hattie & Zierer, 2018). As Marie C. White and Maria
K. DiBenedetto (2018) note, by seeing the impact of their efforts, students take ownership over their learning and are empowered to direct their actions toward the desired outcome. In a meta-analysis including thirty-eight studies, Tanya Santangelo, Karen R. Harris, and Steve Graham (2016) find that, when applied specifically to the writing process, self-regulation strategies significantly enhance the quality of students’ written products, producing a highweighted-effect size of 1.06. In addition to self-regulation applied to learning, Zorana Ivcevic and Marc Brackett (2014) define emotional regulation as our “capacity to evaluate emotion regulation strategies and to influence one’s affective experience and actions in ways that promote goal attainment in emotionally charged situations” (p. 29). These researchers find a significant positive correlation between emotional regulation and grade point average for both middle school and college students. Finally, self-regulation isn’t an innate ability; rather, research consistently concludes that self-regulation is a teachable skill (Duckworth, Grant, Loew, Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2011; Frey et al., 2018; Usher & Schunk, 2018; Yeager, Dahl, & Dweck, 2018).
One difficulty that teachers often cite is that some students don’t have grit; they give up when the work becomes challenging. Self-regulation is directly tied to students’ abilities to persevere in sustaining their attention across time, even when they encounter challenges. By applying the self-regulation process, students experience initial success, which leads them to set more challenging goals for themselves. This self-efficacy—the belief that through hard work they can reach their goals—combined with self-regulation leads to perseverance. Students don’t automatically persevere, they must believe in their abilities and have the self-regulation skills to maintain focus and progress toward their long-term goals (Gaumer Erickson & Baird, 2019).
WHAT TEACHERS SAY
“I think the biggest benefit for students is that they are taking ownership for their actions. It has improved their ability to see what is causing them to be late turning in assignments or why they might have missing assignments. I feel, by students developing their competency, they are improving their own organization.”
—Drew, science teacher
In our work teaching the instructional practices outlined in this book to educators, both teachers and students have observed measurable impacts. Teachers across subject areas have seen positive outcomes, including improved test scores in science, increased engagement with high-quality essays in language arts, increased quality of artwork and engagement in art, and both improved grades and more accurate predictions of the time necessary to complete homework in mathematics. Educators have reported improved learning
