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Students can be taught to become more self-regulated
learners by acquiring specific strategies that are both successful
for them and that enable them to increase their control over their
own behavior and environment. Most researchers agree that the best
learning occurs when someone carefully observes and considers his
own behaviors and acts upon what he has learned. This means that
students learn to decrease negative behaviors and increase positive
behaviors. Therefore, students who are self-regulated must learn
to continually ask themselves "Does this strategy work for me in
this situation?" In order to self-regulate, students must shift
their focus from comparing their performance to peers to self-comparisons,
and from being reactive to being proactive learners. Goals direct
activities, and students must learn that there are different ways
to attain goals, and how to select the best way to complete a specific
task. In many classrooms, teachers assume most of the responsibility
for the learning process and students may begin to depend on this
model of learning.
| Case Study
This portrait of Maria will be used to illustrate
strategies throughout this module.
Maria is an eighth grade student
who was identified as gifted in first grade. She read at the seventh
grade level by the time she finished second grade and has always
scored at the 99% on all areas on standardized achievement tests.
She excels in language arts, but has extremely high scores across
all areas. Maria does not like math and had coasted through the
math curriculum from first through seventh grade, doing minimal
homework and getting top grades. Because of her scores on achievement
tests and previous grades, she is recommended for an advanced algebra
class in eighth grade and encounters, for her first time in school,
some challenge in mathematics. She struggles with a few concepts
and begins to tell her parents that she is really not smart. She
quits whenever she finds a homework problem she can not solve while
doing homework and tells her parents she will ask the teacher the
next day for help. She continues to do her homework each time it
is assigned, but completes only the problems that she can easily
do and gets help from her friends and teacher the next day if she
can not quickly and correctly solve a problem. The answers to problems
are in the back of the book so that after a few minutes of work,
if she has not solved the problem, she looks it up in the back of
the book but fails to learn how to solve the problem. She fails
two tests, becomes convinced she is terrible at math and considers
dropping out of the algebra class. How can she gain the self-regulation
skills she needs to succeed in a more challenging class? |
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