Self-regulated learning (SRL) has become a popular topic in educational psychology research and it has been translated into classroom practices. SRL emphasizes self-sufficiency and control by an individual. An individual is expected to monitor, direct, and regulate their actions towards goals of informational acquisition, expanding expertise, and self-improvement. This basically means that SRL tries to understand how students become adept and independent in their educational pursuits.

Within the past 30 years SRL has changed and developed a great deal. Initially aspects of thinking were isolated, examined and deconstructed into components. Today however, the learning and achievement of students has begun to include and emphasize cognitive strategies, metacognition, motivation, task engagement, and social supports in the classroom. Today SRL provides a more holistic approach to the skills, knowledge, and motivation that students acquire. Early studies used to examine specific strategies, such as summarizing text. However, more recently, studies have begun to examine the diverse ways that readers respond to text. In addition, the variety and relevance of strategies has also increased along with ecological validity. Social collaboration and scaffolding has also started to be implemented in classrooms. Teachers now use pair share activities, reciprocal teaching, and collaborative learning to allow students to work together to improve their own learning.

Due to these recent developments in SRL educational strategies have changed a bit. These strategies are a bit broader. This development was important because it has become a growing realization that, “the effective use of literacy strategies depend on awareness of procedural, declarative, and conditional knowledge, as well as motivational attributions and feelings of efficacy” (92). This is important because it will help students to attribute success to good strategies and failure to bad ones. Thus helping them monitor their behavior and become more self-regulated. In addition cognitive engagement and self-assessment are also important in helping a student to become self-regulated.

There are two metaphors of SRL that researchers and teachers can use. The first metaphor is the metaphor of acquisition, of learning new strategies and skills and then applying them in schools. The second metaphor, on the other hand, emphasizes “becoming” more regulated as students develop new competencies. Both metaphors are useful because they focus on processes of learning, development, and instruction. In addition, there are also 12 principles of SRL that teachers can apply in their classroom to help promote students’ SRL.

Overall SRL helps teachers to provide information and opportunities to all students in order to help them become strategic, motivated, and independent learners.

This article talks about things that can be used in the classroom in order to help promote self regulated learning. The two major contributions to this theory are metacognition and motivation. If the teacher can help to get the students to motivate themselves in the classroom then it becomes easier for the students to learn because they can push themselves to be independent learners. One way that it talks about how students can become self regulated learners by becoming more strategic readers and writers, and then transferring it to become overall strategic learners. Another way that can help students become self regulated learners is to have them use reciprocal teaching. This way they are learning by teaching others and discussing matters with other students. It is important that the teachers allow for open ended questions and discussions so that students are able to think on their own and come up with their own answers to these questions. To do this, teachers can use problem based learning to help their students use different types of critical thinking. To assess students in the self regulated learning theory, it is best to use authentic assessments. Overall students tend to make their own theories of self regulated learning through experience, instruction and engagement.

This essay discusses the research on Self Regulation and how it has changed over the past 20 years or so. Mostly, it discusses how researchers are doing research in context of the classroom instead of in labs and how this has changed their evidence to support the Self Regulation theory. They found that motivation and reflection are extremely important to a student’s performance and teachers must see the importance of teaching these strategies to their students. The body of the article discusses a variety of strategies for different outcomes like reading and writing, cognitive engagement, and self assessment to help students motivate themselves. The Self Regulation theory is described towards the end of the article and it gives a good description of what it means and how to apply Self Regulation in a classroom. I like the overall view of this article as using the theory and really applying it to students. I think showing the theory in context helps to understand it better.