Self regulatory cycle, based on figure 1.1 in Zimmermann (1998) 

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... many universities across the world, courses (especially introductory ones), have large numbers of students. As such, they take place in spacious lecture halls, and constrain the teaching mainly to lectures. Research shows that such instruction fails to help students develop conceptual understanding because it does not encourage students to take responsibility of their own learning (McCray, DeHaan, & Schuck., 2003).The literature refers to two related entities that enable learners to take such responsibility: self-efficacy and self-regulated-learning . According to Bandura (1994) self-efficacy is described as the person’s belief in his or her capability to accomplish learning goals at a designated level of performance and to influence the process of getting to that level ( self-efficacy is relevant in all areas of life but here we refer specifically to learning). Bandura (1994) describes self-efficacy as stemming from four sources: mastery-experience, social-models, social-persuasion and emotional/physical state . Self-regulated-learning is described by Zimmerman (1998) as the self-directed process – that may include thoughts, feelings and actions a learner uses in order to attain a personal goal of learning. He claims that it is a cyclical process with three stages (see Figure 1) – (a) forethought , (b) performance-control and (c) self-reflection . The forethought stage deals with the preparation towards the actual learning, which occurs in the second stage. In the third stage the learner reflects on his/her current state and proceeds to another cycle of the preparation stage ( forethought ) to make required changes towards the continuation of the learning process (Zimmerman & Campillo, 2003). Each of the stages of the Self-regulation cycle involves several components, as can be seen in Figure 1. In this research we developed an instructional model that harnesses technology to support students in assuming responsibility of their own learning. We gradually implemented the model in a large introductory biology course (about 250-350 students), which has been taught for years as a traditional lecture-based course. We introduced a web-based tutorial, which included videotaped lectures, interactive visualizations and self feedback questions as an additional resource for the course, as can be seen in Figure 2. The different features of the tutorial were designed to increase the students’ control over the learning process: the video recordings are synchronized with the lecture slides and annotated with sub-topics. The students can choose to skip parts they feel that they already comprehend and repeat others that they don’t. The feedback questions direct the students to additional resources related to each question (a section of the video recording, a page in the textbook, or an interactive visualization). In the first phase of the study, the use of the online tutorial was optional; course meetings were still devoted to lectures, in which all course contents were covered, similarly to the way this course has been taught for many years prior to this study’s intervention. In the second phase, students were required to learn some of the course contents using the online tutorial. This enabled the lecturer to skip some of the details and to go into more depth of the contents and make connections between different concepts and course topics. The purpose of the research was to examine how the gradual shift of responsibility from the instructor to the students affects the self-regulation and self-efficacy of students in three successive course enactments. Specifically, we wanted to explore whether (and to what extent) there will be a change in specific components of self-regulation and self-efficacy , and how these relate with other factors such as students’ attitudes toward the course, and their final grades. A total of 834 freshmen students in biology participated in three semester-long enactments of the introductory biology course between 2008 and 2010: 250 in a pre-intervention stage (one year before the online tutorial was introduced) 320 in phase-1(optional tutorial; regular lectures) and 280 in phase-2 (required self-learning from tutorial; in-depth instruction of particular topics in lectures). Data sources included: 1. Feedback survey that was given to all students toward the end of the course. Most of the survey was comprised of Likert type questions about the usage of specific features of the instructional model and their contribution to student’s learning. One open question at the end of this survey enabled students to write general comments about how they perceived the course. 2. Interviews with 18 selected students from the second and third enactments who were chosen based on their usage of the tutorial (“heavy-users”, “typical-users” and ”none-users”) were asked specifically about their use of the online tutorial and their attitudes towards the instructional model. 3. Server log files that provided us with information regarding the number of times each student accessed each webpage. 4. Test scores , based on 30-40 multiple-choice questions developed and assessed by the course instructors. Students’ utterances in the written comments and the interviews were analyzed using a verbal analysis technique (Chi, 1997), with the categories shown in Table 1. The categories we chose to use as indicators for self-regulated-learning and self-efficacy were those that appeared in more than 10% of utterances. The quantitative data (server logs and test scores) was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The analysis indicates that once the tutorial was introduced (phase-1) its usage was high (server data shows that more than 90% of the students used it at least once). About 50% of the students who filled the surveys in the year that the tutorial was first introduced declared that they use the tutorial often (“for all/most of the course topics”). The usage became even more extensive in phase-2. For example: based on the server data, in phase-1 each student watched, on average, eight different video recordings (out of twenty-eight). In phase-2 the average went up to eighteen – 64% of the video recordings. Students’ satisfaction from the tutorial is evident from the survey results - 78% of ...

Context 2

... many universities across the world, courses (especially introductory ones), have large numbers of students. As such, they take place in spacious lecture halls, and constrain the teaching mainly to lectures. Research shows that such instruction fails to help students develop conceptual understanding because it does not encourage students to take responsibility of their own learning (McCray, DeHaan, & Schuck., 2003).The literature refers to two related entities that enable learners to take such responsibility: self-efficacy and self-regulated-learning . According to Bandura (1994) self-efficacy is described as the person’s belief in his or her capability to accomplish learning goals at a designated level of performance and to influence the process of getting to that level ( self-efficacy is relevant in all areas of life but here we refer specifically to learning). Bandura (1994) describes self-efficacy as stemming from four sources: mastery-experience, social-models, social-persuasion and emotional/physical state . Self-regulated-learning is described by Zimmerman (1998) as the self-directed process – that may include thoughts, feelings and actions a learner uses in order to attain a personal goal of learning. He claims that it is a cyclical process with three stages (see Figure 1) – (a) forethought , (b) performance-control and (c) self-reflection . The forethought stage deals with the preparation towards the actual learning, which occurs in the second stage. In the third stage the learner reflects on his/her current state and proceeds to another cycle of the preparation stage ( forethought ) to make required changes towards the continuation of the learning process (Zimmerman & Campillo, 2003). Each of the stages of the Self-regulation cycle involves several components, as can be seen in Figure 1. In this research we developed an instructional model that harnesses technology to support students in assuming responsibility of their own learning. We gradually implemented the model in a large introductory biology course (about 250-350 students), which has been taught for years as a traditional lecture-based course. We introduced a web-based tutorial, which included videotaped lectures, interactive visualizations and self feedback questions as an additional resource for the course, as can be seen in Figure 2. The different features of the tutorial were designed to increase the students’ control over the learning process: the video recordings are synchronized with the lecture slides and annotated with sub-topics. The students can choose to skip parts they feel that they already comprehend and repeat others that they don’t. The feedback questions direct the students to additional resources related to each question (a section of the video recording, a page in the textbook, or an interactive visualization). In the first phase of the study, the use of the online tutorial was optional; course meetings were still devoted to lectures, in which all course contents were covered, similarly to the way this course has been taught for many years prior to this study’s intervention. In the second phase, students were required to learn some of the course contents using the online tutorial. This enabled the lecturer to skip some of the details and to go into more depth of the contents and make connections between different concepts and course topics. The purpose of the research was to examine how the gradual shift of responsibility from the instructor to the students affects the self-regulation and self-efficacy of students in three successive course enactments. Specifically, we wanted to explore whether (and to what extent) there will be a change in specific components of self-regulation and self-efficacy , and how these relate with other factors such as students’ attitudes toward the course, and their final grades. A total of 834 freshmen students in biology participated in three semester-long enactments of the introductory biology course between 2008 and 2010: 250 in a pre-intervention stage (one year before the online tutorial was introduced) 320 in phase-1(optional tutorial; regular lectures) and 280 in phase-2 (required self-learning from tutorial; in-depth instruction of particular topics in lectures). Data sources included: 1. Feedback survey that was given to all students toward the end of the course. Most of the survey was comprised of Likert type questions about the usage of specific features of the instructional model and their contribution to student’s learning. One open question at the end of this survey enabled students to write general comments about how they perceived the course. 2. Interviews with 18 selected students from the second and third enactments who were chosen based on their usage of the tutorial (“heavy-users”, “typical-users” and ”none-users”) were asked specifically about their use of the online tutorial and their attitudes towards the instructional model. 3. Server log files that provided us with information regarding the number of times each student accessed each webpage. 4. Test scores , based on 30-40 multiple-choice questions developed and assessed by the course instructors. Students’ utterances in the written comments and the interviews were analyzed using a verbal analysis technique (Chi, 1997), with the categories shown in Table 1. The categories we chose to use as indicators for self-regulated-learning and self-efficacy were those that appeared in more than 10% of utterances. The quantitative data (server logs and test scores) was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The analysis indicates that once the tutorial was introduced (phase-1) its usage was high (server data shows that more than 90% of the students used it at least once). About 50% of the students who filled the surveys in the year that the tutorial was first introduced declared that they use the tutorial often (“for all/most of the course topics”). The usage became even more extensive in phase-2. For example: based on the server data, in phase-1 each student watched, on average, eight different video recordings (out of twenty-eight). In phase-2 the average went up to eighteen – 64% of the video recordings. Students’ satisfaction from the tutorial is evident from the survey results - 78% of the students’ that answered the survey indicated that the tutorial had a large positive impact on their learning process, and 80% of the utterances regarding the tutorial were positive - e.g. “The new website is a great tool for learning”. The interviews revealed the same picture; only one out of seven interviewees that participated in the first phase did not see the online tutorial as a useful tool for learning. One of the interviewees even said “without the site I would have been lost”. It is important to note that no ...