SRL

Ready to promote self-regulated learning (SRL) in elementary school? Using a smartphone application-based professional development program to enhance elemetary school teachers"

01.09.2022 bis 31.08.2025

Self-regulated learning (SRL) describes the process that assists students in managing their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions in order to successfully navigate their learning experiences. SRL skills embrace a set of strategies, such as setting goals for learning, planning, monitoring, and evaluating one’s work as well as regulating one’s emotions and motivation. Students who better manage to self-regulate their learning tend to have higher academic achievement and other positive developmental outcomes. Hence, fostering SRL is an important educational goal.
To date, there is agreement among SRL scholars that even young children can learn to effectively employ self-regulatory strategies. Younger students may even be particularly susceptible to SRL instructions as they are still at the beginning stages of developing learning and self-efficacy beliefs, and ineffective learning strategies may not yet be fully established. However, elementary school students often struggle to effectively self-regulate their learning. Hence, there is a clear need to foster SRL already in elementary school. Elementary school teachers play a key role in students’ SRL development. Still, research indicates that elementary school teachers often lack relevant knowledge, feel unprepared to implement SRL training in class, and infrequently instruct students on how to use SRL strategies. Relevant competences elementary school teachers need to effectively promote their students’ SRL that have been identified in the literature include elementary school teachers’ (a) knowledge about SRL and ways to promote SRL, (b) own SRL skills, (c) beliefs about the value of SRL, and (d) self-efficacy to successfully support students’ SRL.
Against this background, the proposed project aims to develop and evaluate a smartphone application-based intervention offering a professional development program for elementary school teachers to enhance their competences to foster their students’ SRL. In addition to improvements in elementary school teachers’ competences to support students’ SRL (knowledge, own SRL, value beliefs, self-efficacy beliefs), and elementary school teachers’ implementation of SRL training in class, effects on their students SRL and academic achievement are of interest. The project will draw on the well-established cyclical model of SRL introduced by Zimmerman (e.g., Zimmerman, 2000) as a theoretical framework for the smartphone application-based professional development program and on the rich research base on SRL in educational settings, combined with insights on intervention research with digital technologies. In Study 1, members of the target group (elementary school teachers and their students) will be involved in the process of creating the app and its contents. In Study 2, relying on a randomized controlled field trial-design with an intervention group and a waitlist control group and samples of elementary school teachers and their fourth grade students, the project then seeks to test the efficacy of the app-based professional development program for increasing (a) core components of elementary school teachers’ competences with regard to SRL promotion (knowledge about SRL and SRL promotion, own SRL skills, value beliefs, self-efficacy to support their students’ SRL), (b) elementary school teachers’ implementation of SRL in class, and (c) their students’ SRL and academic achievement. To achieve a deeper understanding, mechanisms transmitting the effects (mediators) and indicators of implementation quality will additionally be considered in Study 2. Furthermore, it is planned to make the rigorously tested app publicly available after the project to support the professional development of a large number of elementary school teachers and thus the widespread implementation of SRL training in elementary school classes.