By Paul J. Bloomberg; Ed.D; Executive Director of The Core Collaborative

The Core Collaborative professional development network utilizes current research on “student centered” approaches to learning that lead to deeper learning. It is important for students to own their learning and for learning to be personalized to the student for learning to be student-centered. Since we have been writing about self-assessment in relationship to the concepts and skills connected to state and nationals standards, I thought it might be interesting to write an entry about self-assessing self-regulated learning skills. If our goal is for students to own their learning our students must self-regulate.

Self-regulation encompasses the monitoring and managing of one’s cognitive processes as well as the awareness of and control over one’s emotions, motivations, behavior and environment as related to learning. Self-regulated learning is learning that is guided by metacognition (thinking about one’s thinking), strategic action (planning, monitoring, and evaluating personal progress against a standard), and motivation to learn. “Self-regulated” describes a process of taking control of an evaluating one’s own learning and behavior. So… being “self –regulated” can support increasing your own learning immensely.

Before teaching a unit of study or a course, it makes sense to pre-assess your students’ self-regulated learning skills. It will be important that they be a part of knowing what their strengths are and have them determine what goals they have for improving their own self-regulated learning skills. If you are planning on teaching self-regulated learning skills this assessment can act as a baseline measure prior to your course.

One instrument, called the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory, assesses general self-regulated learning skills across the disciplines. Developed by Schraw and Dennision (1994), it has 52 items classified by: 1) type of cognitive knowledge 2) specific metacognitive processes…

Type of Cognitive Knowledge:

• Declarative = what (DK)

• Procedural = how (PK)

• Conditional = when and why to apply (CK)

Specific Metacognitive Process:

• Planning (P)

• Information Management Strategies (IMS)

• Monitoring (M)

• Debugging Strategies (DS)

• Evaluation (E)

Here are 8 sample items from each of the categories. You may want to select 15-30 self-assessment items for your students that target the skills on which you plan to embed in the instruction of your course or unit of study.

• I have control over how well I learn (DK)

• I am aware of what strategies I use when I study or learn (PK)

• I use my intellectual strengths to compensate for my weakness (CK)

• I think about what I really need to learn before I begin a task (P)

• I consider several alternatives to a problem before I try to answer it (M)

• I summarize what I’ve learned after I am finished learning it (E)

• I draw pictures or diagrams to help me understand (IMS)

• I change strategies when I don’t understand (DS)

One of the goals of our work at The Core Collaborative is for students to be self-aware and to have an understanding of how they learn best. Pre-Assessing and teaching skills and strategies to build self-regulated learning skills is a no-brainer!

Works Cited:

• Creating Self-Regulated Learners by Linda B. Nilson

• Schraw, G., Dennison, R. S. (1994). Assessing metacognitive awareness. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 19, 460-475.

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