Commentary on Self Regulation in School Contexts

This article explains the different methods of teaching and using self regulation. Many teachers have different ideas on how to self regulate their students. Some researchers believe that when you compare good and poor self regulators that is how you can tell what kind of self regulation is helping that student. Researchers also have concluded that if a student had great self regulatory skills, than that student will be more academically motivated and have better learning skills. Another assumption researchers have taken into effect is how cognitive and emotional factors play into self regulation. There are many different ways to see how self regulation affects students.

Three men by the names of Perels, Gurtler, and Schmitz conducted a self regulation experiment by separating the students into different self regulation groups to see which group had the most success with self regulation. They decided that the Self regulation training group scored highest on their math tests and the students thought more on their own to figure out the math problems. These men tested out their theory and got the results they wanted about self regulation.

There are many examples out there to test self regulation and to see which theory works the best. This article was very interesting to read and to see what all of the researchers came up with to test it out.

Self-Regulation:

-“an active, constructive process where by learners set goals for their learning and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior, guided and constrained by their goals and the contextual features in the environment.”

-used to explain achievement differences among students

-the more self-regulation the higher academic achievement and better learning skills.

-Perels, Gurtler, and Schmitz Expirement

-Four week evaluation

-Six 90 min sessions

-Self-regulation condition

-teaches goal-setting, motivation, and self-reflection

-second best results

-Problem solving condition

-teaches problem solving, working forwards and backwards, and invariance

-Combined condition

-uses techniques from both conditions

-had the best results

-Control condition

-no direction was given

-Teachers can use the test results to set up learning groups in the classroom to improve students’ learning styles.