Solo task 1: What is Self-Regulated Learning SRL?
Self-Regulated learning SRL, I heard about it when I started my studies in LET Programme and I felt that it might be the right solution for me to put myself on the lifelong learning path. And now when I attended the first lecture I certainly felt that if I managed to master this self-regulating skills I will achieve what I want.
Planning phase:
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I read the two required articles, “Social cognitive theoretical perspective of self-regulation” by Usher & Schunk (2018), the chapter “The Role of goal orientation in self- regulated learning” by Pintrich (2000). Also, I attended the lecture given by Sanna Järvelä, that was titled “What is Self-Regulated Learning?”.
After reflecting on my previous strategies I found out that the way I used to read which is deep reading and taking notes for each idea is not fruitful as it should be at least with time constraints, so I shifted to fast reading strategies and changing my notes into mind mapping. Changing your studying strategies that you used for a long time is not that easy and it takes some time to happen, but once I master them then I will be able to take the most advantage of them. This is my first step towards regulating myself and I'm excited yet afraid a little bit.
The following picture is the first mind map I wrote for this course, I guess there will be much more yet to come.
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My goal for the first task is to produce an acceptable blog about what I have read and understood from the articles and the lecture related to them using ICE notes.
ICE notes
SRL is a process of learning to monitor, evaluate and regulate your own feelings and thoughts, The first idea that I liked and want to talk about is that regulating emotions is one of the steps needed in SRL. When Professor Sanna said "regulating emotions is 'engaging' your mind and asking questions to yourself like why am I frustrated?".The word engaging made me think how complicated and complex is this process and that it has specific steps and how it is important to master such skill. Regulating emotions is an essential skill that I need to acquire because it can be considered as a weak point in me. I'm emotional and can't control my emotions, at least everyone in front of me can definitely know how am I feeling at the moment, and in some situations it is not a good thing.
A lot of times emotions made us take the wrong decisions and affected our progress on a certain path. So we need to ask ourselves why has this happened? how can we behave next time? how to avoid such situation in the future? These questions will increase our awareness about our feelings and give us the real vision that we need to regulate our emotions, as Sanna said: " metacognition activates target for regulation".
As for the second idea that I like to talk about is the definition of SRL that says it is a cyclical phenomenon ( forethought, performance and reflection)and past experiences contribute to regulation. Without the past experiences, one can't know how he reacted or achieved previously and will not be able to know his strengths and weaknesses, accordingly he will not be able to regulate himself for the better. Since reflection is one of the three main phases of the cyclical phenomena, without it the cycle will be disconnected thus not achievable anymore.
Reflection
I am a procrastinator that keep postponing my duties until the end. It is now 1:20 am and I'm not done yet and this because I didn't set a definite schedule with the specific timing of the steps that I should follow. SRL is a lifestyle of learning, it is an adaptive process that you develop and refine over time. I hope and I'm sure that by the end of this course I will be able to apply self-regulating skills to me, this will be able to set my goals and follow the specific steps and strategies that are best for me in order to master it and by mastering it I will own a weapon that will help me in achieving all my goals and dreams in the future.
References:
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- Usher, E.L. & Schunk D.H. (2018) Social cognitive theoretical perspective of self-regulation. In Schunk D.H & Greene J.A. (Eds.), Handbook of Self-regulation of Learning and Performance 2nd Ed.
- Pintrich, P. R. (2000). The Role of goal orientation in self-regulated learning. In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, & M. Zeidner (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 451–502). Academic Press
-Zimmerman, B. J. & Schunk, D. H. (2001). Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achievement. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Newyork
Solo Task 3: Emotion and Motivation in SRL.
Going deeper in SRL uncover a lot of new information, skills and strategies that one can take advantage of in order to reach his goal no matter how hard or far was this goal.
Planning phase :
For this task, I have to discuss the role of emotion and motivation in SRL. I have read two interesting articles, one for Monique Boekaerts titled " Emotions, Emotion Regulation and Self-Regulation of Learning" and another for Christopher Wolters titled " Regulation of Motivation: An Underemphasized Aspect of Self-Regulated Learning" and attended a lecture by Hanna Jarvenoja.
Considering the number of assignments that we have, one has to take some serious decisions whether in planning or applying. I have decided to read the two articles and write the blog on the same day, not in a continuous pace since I have three little girls wondering around me, I have started around 10 am and now it is 12:38 am and I won't sleep till I finish it (this can be considered extrinsic punishment, one of the motivational strategies I liked). And I'm pretty sure that I will finish this blog. This is my goal and I am very determinant to accomplish it.
Also in order to focus more, I'm using an application that helps me to focus, the app is based on Pomodoro technique that helps in improving productivity; the app divides my time for doing a goal as the following: working for 25 minutes then having 5 minutes break, this will be repeated for four laps and then I can have 25 minutes break. It is really working for me and I like the sound of the clock ticking every second to remind me to work.
The final step in my plan is to do another thing after finishing my writing and before I go to sleep, because when I'm sleeping directly after reading I see my self reading the articles again without understanding anything and wake up with the same frustration feeling that I had inside the dream and this is not good for my emotions, my brain or even my kids.
ICE Notes:
Both articles were interesting to me and I was able to understand 90% of them. I'm an emotional person that wants to be able to regulate her emotions and motivation appropriately according to situations I confront in my everyday life, thus reading them was a need to me.
Boekearts started by linking emotion regulations to self-regulated learning and representing a Dual Processing Self-Regulation Model that shows appraisals has a dominant role because they assign meaning to learning tasks. Later, it talked about different purposes of self-regulation, then introduced emotions, feelings and affect. Emotion was defined as affectively charged cognitions, feelings, moods, affect, and well-being. Continued by Frijda (1988) that explained that emotions provide energy and impact all cognitive processes, including attention, recall, event interpretation, decision making and problem-solving. After introducing emotions' qualifications, functions and achievements, emotion regulation was introduced and defined, finally, emotion regulation strategies were presented like expressing emotions, suppressing emotions, denial and distraction,re-appraising the situation and finally acquiring and providing social support.
One strategy that I liked the most is expressing emotions, because I feel that the ability to express your emotions will help you in easing your feelings and for example if there was something frustrating you or making you sad, crying would relief you a lot from your negative emotions, that way you will get rid of the negative energy that accompanies it. I know a girl aged 9 years old, she was a smart joyful social girl and had no health problems. But suddenly she started to wet her bed at night two or three days in a raw then the mum started to search for a reason since there were no medical reasons for that. the mum thought that the problem might be psychological. She sat with her and asked her if she is annoyed from anyone or if anything is bothering her, the girl burst into tears and told her mum that some of her classmates are annoying her because of her size since she was small compared to her classmates. The mum hugged her and started to chat with her that size is not important and what matters is your brain and behaviour and that everyone is special and has unique characteristics and she shouldn't be bothered by them because talking about her size wouldn't affect her grades nor behaviour. After this little conversation, the girl didn't wet her bed anymore. And her motivation to go to school has returned.
Re-appraising the situation is another strategy that drove my attention, Loewenstein (2007) defined reappraisal as the act of construing a potentially emotional situation in a way that enhances positive emotions and diminishes negative affect. there was an example given about a girl having a math exam and was finding difficulty in solving the first question, so she looked at her friends and found that they are having problems in the same questions, so this girl managed to depersonalize the learning assignment by considering it in a more objective way. My question is what would happen to this girl if she looked at her friends and found that all of them are answering this question easily, how she would have reacted??? and what strategy she would have used to regulate her emotions??
Back to the second article, Wolters started by defining self-regulated learning as a function of students' motivation, cognitive strategy use, and metacognition. Then regulation of motivation was introduced as a component of self- regulated learning. later, she discussed regulation of motivation and its relation to other aspects of self-regulated learning. then she distinguished between motivation and regulation of motivation, regulation of motivation and metacognition and volition. Finally, presenting strategies for the regulation of motivation such as self-consequating, goal-oriented self-talk, interest enhancement, environmental structuring, self-handicapping, attribution control, efficacy management and finally emotion regulation.
Self-consequating is a strategy that I follow without knowing that it was a motivational strategy, so now I am aware that this strategy is helping me in increasing my motivation. As a definition, it is the use of self-administered or self-provided consequences for their own behaviour. for example, I promised myself that when I finish reading the first article I can eat Icecream and that is what I did, this was extrinsic reinforcement. later I decided that I won't sleep till I finish this blog and this is called self-punishment. there were a lot of studies talking about this strategy and its effectiveness. Most of them agreed that it has been positively associated with increases in students' effort, performance, and general well-being. I'm a living example of it, now it is 2:31 am and I'm still motivated and writing my blog.
Reflection:
By looking at my solo planning, I have achieved my goal and read the articles and wrote the blog in one day. Yet I discovered that this was really challenging, taking into consideration my other responsibilities than this blog. The fact that it is 2:40 am and I'm still writing amazed me because I have never imagined myself staying for this hour writing a blog for a course and with a positive feeling. This is my first time that I really enjoy doing an assignment, and I think that I did this because the subject tackled by this articles was really authentic to me and I was able to relate it with a lot of situations in my life. I'm planning to apply the other strategies that I have learnt, and that way I will be able to regulate my emotions and motivation in a better way. If I had to adjust things for the next blog then I have to divide reading the articles into separate days and write the blog in different chunks of time.
References:
- Boekaerts, M. (2011). Emotions, emotion regulation, and self-regulation of learning. In Handbook of self-regulation of learning and performance. (pp. 408–425).
- Frijda, N. H. (1988). The laws of emotion. American Psychologist, 43, 349–358.
- Loewenstein, G. (2007). Affect regulation and affective forecasting. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 180–203). New York: Guilford.
- Wolters, C. A. (2003). Regulation of Motivation: Evaluating an Underemphasized Aspect of Self Regulated Learning. Educational Psychologist, 38 (4), pp. 189-205.
Solo task 4: Cognition and Metacognition
Cognition and Metacognition are two terms that were first introduced to me in the university in my home country, and I can say that it was not that good experience, in fact, I am regulating myself to overcome some negative feelings that I experience whenever I hear these two words.
Planning Phase:
This is the last solo task we have in our Self-regulated learning course, we had to read an article titled "Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring" for John Flavell (1979), also we were introduced to the first article in Metacognition and Learning international journal, which I find an interesting journal with a simple clear style, easy to understand. It was titled "Metacognition and Learning: conceptual and methodological considerations" written by Veenman, Van Hout- Wolters and Afflerbach (2006). In addition to the required articles, I also attended a lecture given by Jonna Malmberg about the same topic.
After I finish the exam, I am planning to read some articles from this journal. In its last issue in December 2017, I found an article that is really interesting and related to me but can't read because of time restrictions but now it is on my reading list for Christmas holiday. The title of the article is "Examination the relations of time management and procrastination within a model of Self-regulated learning" written by Wolters, Won and Hussain.
My goal for this study period is to finish writing this blog successfully, and my goal for this whole course is to get 5 to add it to my 5 that I got in Foundations of Learning course. I really want to keep this level because I want to continue my studies and get a PhD degree. I hope I will achieve it, what I know is that I am doing the most of what I can.
ICE Notes:
In addition to the blog tasks, I had a teaching task on this topic specifically, I chose it because I wanted to challenge myself and overcome my negative emotions toward these words. I read additional articles and with the help of my team Diego, Larrisa and TK we found an interesting aspect that we can dig deeper into it. This aspect was metacognitive awareness, and Diego found an inventory that measures metacognitive awareness. I was really excited and motivated to apply it to myself first because I wanted to know my weaknesses and strengths in this area.
According to Schraw and Dennison (1994), metacognition refers to the ability to reflect upon, understand and control one's learning. In addition, they mentioned the distinguish done by previous researchers for the components of metacognition, and stated that there are two major components of metacognition; knowledge about cognition and this includes three subprocesses; declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge, then there is the regulation of cognition which is divided into five strategies; information management strategy, debugging strategy, planning, comprehensive monitoring and evaluation.
According to some researches, learners that are aware metacognitively are more strategic and perform better than unaware learners. Dennison and Schraw explained that this type of awareness allows individuals to plan, sequence and monitor their learning in a way that directly improves performance.
For example, based on my score in this inventory, I was able to know where are my strengths and weaknesses. I was able to know that my declarative knowledge is better than the other two and I have strength in debugging strategy but I really need to work on planning, comprehensive monitoring and evaluation. These skills are quite essential for SRL, hence I started to search for techniques to improve my planning; I found SWOT analysis, Eisenhower Matrix for setting priorities and other monitoring and evaluation strategies.
The second point I want to talk about is the object level and meta level mentioned by Nelson (1996), it was a simple and clear model that includes both metacognitive knowledge and skills. Cognitive activities happen at the object level and send information through monitoring to the meta level. While the meta level gives instructions to the object level through control process, and this cyclicality is continuous. For example, I am studying for the exam, my pace that I am studying with, the time left for exam and materials left to study are at the object level. By monitoring process, this information will be sent to the meta level, where it is analysed and compared to the circumstances. the results apparently that there is something wrong, I won't be able to finish everything on the time scheduled. So control process will be activated by meta level to resolve this issue by suggesting to change the strategy I'm using for studying into another one that is faster and that I should focus on the main points needed instead of reviewing everything.
Reflection:
Apparently, I have achieved my goal of finishing this blog. Yet the main goal of getting 5 can't be known until after the exam results, but I am optimistic.
The more I reflect on what I am writing and what I am feeling and thinking, the more I see how my personality is gradually changing and that my thinking is not the same anymore. I relate my actions or other people actions and behaviours for things that I have read. I read what might be the solution to a problem I have encountered. My reading habit will definitely be changed. I will set a reading goal about a topic in SRL in my weekly plan, I've never considered reading as a goal in my life.
I believe that big changes started with small steps but the condition is that these small steps or small actions should be a continuous one. The will is the motor of these actions and behaviours, without a will, there is no progress in any situation.
References:
-Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: a new area of cognitive developmental inquiry. The American Psychologist, 34, 906–911. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906.
- Veenman, M.V.J., Van Hout-Wolters, B.H.A.M., & Afflerbach, P. (2006). Metacognition and learning: Conceptual and methodological considerations. Metacognition and Learning, 1, 3-14
- Schraw, G. & Dennison, R. S. (1994). Assessing Metacognitive Awareness. Conditional Educationl Psychology. 19, 460-475.
Solo Task 2 : Models of SRL
According to Panadero(2017), SRL is an extraordinary umbrella under which a considerable number of variables that influence learning are studied within a comprehensive and holistic approach. This definition is really authentic and you can capture the meaning of SRL from it.
Planning :
For this solo task, we were assigned to read two articles, the first one is "Attaining Self-Regulation: A Social Cognitive Perspective" written by Zimmermen (2000). The second one is " Studying as self-regulated learning" by Winne & Hadwin (1998). These two articles introduce different models for SRL that researchers have adapted and developed through years, and explained some of these models in details.
There was an extra article that we can read and I thank God that I have read it based on my classmate recommendation, it is for Panadero (2017), titled " A review of Self-regulated Learning: Six Models and Four Directions for Research". To me, this article was the most exciting, it was like the fresh bread coming out of the oven in front of me. this article gathered six models for SRL, they are, Zimmerman; Boekaerts; Winne and Hadwin; Pintrich; Efklides; and Hadwin; Jarvela and Miller. it analyzed and compared them to each other.
In this task, my goal is to finish this blog and try to find a model that I can apply for my self-regulated learning. I won't draw a mind map because each model is a mind map in itself, upon reflecting on this situation I should search for strategies other than mind mapping to apply it for summarizing articles or paragraphs.
Ice Notes:
The two ideas that I'm going to tackle in this task are related to two models that I felt most comfortable with, the Zimmerman model and Boekaerts model.
Zimmerman model was simple and easy to understand and follow,he handled self-regulated learning from a socio-cognitive perspective. He developed it from a Triadic model (1989) to Cyclical Phases model (two versions) (2000, 2003) then the Multi-Level model (2009). I prefer to talk about the second version of the Cyclical Phase model. It shows three phases of self-regulated learning; forethought, Performance and self-reflection.
When I was reading I directly imagined a professional chess player in a game. The player in the forethought phase is setting a goal which is the gold medal and strategically planning for his moves, these are the components of task analysis. He is confident and has high expectations that he will win this game since chess is his passion and he has been playing for more than ten years; these are the motivational beliefs that energies the process. Then there is the performance phase, where he has a clear image of the chess board and how his soldiers are moving on it, he starts to execute the steps he had planned and based on the opponent move he will adjust his next move. He recalls some of the situations that he had been through and tries to avoid the mistakes he made previously. Finally, after winning the game, he evaluates his performance and how he won the game with difficulty since his opponent was a hard one. He attributes his winning to his continuous practice and his commitment to improving his skills in case of winning or losing. This is how I'm going to recall this model in my memory, even try to analyze upcoming situations and relate it to each phase.
As forBoekaerts, I was interested in how she divided the purposes for self-regulated learning into three. First, there is "Top-down" purpose, as performing a certain task goal because of my own values, needs and personal goals(mastery/growth pathway); such as when a classmate wanted to learn Suomi language. She was motivated and excited to learn this language because she loves to learn new languages. The second purpose is "bottom-up", as performing a certain task goal just to avoid self from being damaged(well-being pathway). this was my classmate case with Suomi language, she didn't like this language but she had to study in order to succeed and get the credits, the Suomi language was never among her learning goals. Finally, the third one is when a student tries to redirect their strategies from the well-being to the mastery/growth pathway. This is exactly what happened to me, I wasn't motivated to learn Suomi language and I heard that it was one of the five most difficult languages in the world. But then after a discussion with my husband, I was convinced that since I was going to live here for at least two years then I need to know how to communicate with everyone around me, also I took it as a challenge that I am able to overcome and this is what I did. I began to enjoy the Suomi language course and become more motivated towards it, at the end I finished the course successfully.
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Reflection :
Looking back at my solo task, I can see that I have achieved my goal of writing this blog task. But the challenge I faced is choosing the correct model that suits me, in each model, there was something that I can relate it to me. yet I feel that I need to dig deeper into these models in order to find the one that I will follow and apply to my life. As for learning strategy that I followed with this task is highlighting the main ideas and keywords and writing a short sentence that explains each paragraph.
References:
Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). Attaining Self-Regulation: A Social Cognitive Perspective. In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, & M. Zeidner (Eds.), Handbook of Self-Regulation (pp. 1–35). Academic Press.
- Winne, P. H., & Hadwin, A. F. (1998). Studying as self-regulated learning. In D. J. Hacker, J. Dunlosky, & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Metacognition in educational theory and practice (pp. 277– 304). Routledge.
- Panadero, E. (2017). A Review of Self-regulated Learning: Six Models and Four Directions for Research. Frontiers in Psychology, 8.
I intentionally didn't edit my first solo task, because I wanted to keep it as a record of how I started my writing, that way I can compare it to my later writing and I will be able to know what level I was, what are my weaknesses and where I should improve my self.