Page 229 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
or levels in the development of self-regulated learning (Zimmerman, 2013). In the rst two stages, students rely heavily on external regulation, mostly provided by the teacher. e rst stage is observational, where learning is based on observing the teacher who models the self-regulatory behaviour, e.g., while solving an equation on the blackboard, the teacher asks himself or herself questions to check if he or she is not forgetting any of the steps in the process. e second is emulation: Students learn by imitating the teacher’s behaviour in a similar task. In this stage, teacher or peer guidance, feedback, and reinforcement is vital. is support can be reduced once students are capable to perform the basic steps. In the last two stages, the balance shi s from external towards internal regulation. e third stage is self-controlled, where students, by means of deliberate practice, learn to master the skill independently in structured settings (i.e., settings designed by the teacher for the purpose of this practice). In this stage, students set their own standards for acceptable performance and encourage themselves to achieve this level of performance by self-talk and feedback. In essence, then, the teacher’s role is being internalised. More deliberate practice will lead to the automatisation of this self- controlled behaviour in xed settings. At the last stage, which is self-regulatory, students are capable of complete self-regulation: ey can transfer their learned self-controlled behaviour to other contexts and in other conditions than the structured settings that were designed for practice. In this stage, students are also able to choose appropriate learning strategies and to monitor and – if necessary – adapt their learning activities independently. Necessary conditions of this last level of self-regulation are 1) cognition (learning and thinking skills or strategies); 2) metacognition (knowledge about your own cognition and skills that monitor and control your learning and thinking); and 3) motivation (positive beliefs and attitudes towards learning, including self-e cacy beliefs) (Zimmerman, 2000). All three are necessary and lead to the best academic results, as we also clearly saw in Chapter 5, where secondary school students high in both intellectual engagement (motivation) and cognitive engagement (composed of both cognitive and metacognitive aspects) adjusted and performed best in university.
Teachers’ contribution to students’ self-regulation development
What is already happening in secondary school regarding self-regulation development? In Chapter 6, teachers did not directly refer to self-regulation as an important attribute of a successful university student, but about half of them did mention study skills and/or independence as important characteristics, both of
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