Somewhere last week, or perhaps the week before, someone commented on one of my blog posts on social media that perhaps we should simply stop doing most research. The reason, to be fair, was a research finding that this person didn’t particularly like. But I have to admit that I have occasionally had the same thought when reading yet another study on a topic I have already read a lot about, such as executive functions or self-regulated learning. When I talk about this topic myself, based on one of my books, I have long pointed out that the development of SRL is not linear. A new review by Dignath, Van Berk and Vosniadou confirms this once again, but, and here is the catch, each new study often brings new nuances. And that is the case here too!
In their review, the researchers bring together studies on the development of self-regulated learning from preschool through to the end of secondary education. Their work includes 49 studies from 19 countries, involving more than 30,000 children and young people in total. That in itself is an achievement.
In their analysis, the researchers distinguish between several components related to self-regulated learning. First, they discuss executive functions, such as working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. In their model, these provide an important cognitive foundation. Metacognition, meanwhile, includes knowing which learning strategies exist, when to use them and how to monitor your own learning. Self-regulated learning is broader still, also encompassing motivation, behaviour and emotions. Nothing particularly new under the sun here.
Development?
Different things develop at different ages. In early childhood, executive functions develop strongly. During primary school, children then become better at metacognition. They know more about strategies, become better at planning and more accurate at assessing their own performance.
Now, you might expect them to start using those strategies more and more as well, unless you spend your days teaching. Because the answer is: not really. Around the transition from primary to secondary education, several studies find a decline in the reported use of self-regulated learning strategies. This decline can then continue throughout adolescence.
Or, to put it differently: students increasingly have the cognitive capacity to regulate their own learning, but that does not automatically mean that they make greater use of that capacity. But… there was something else I learned.
Maybe we are also measuring something different
When the researchers put all these studies side by side, they ran into a fairly important methodological problem. With young children, executive functions and self-regulation are often studied through tasks, observations and direct measurements. But as students get older, researchers increasingly switch to questionnaires in which young people themselves report how often they use particular learning strategies.
So you end up with roughly this picture:
- executive functions improve
- metacognitive knowledge improves
- but self-reported strategy use declines.
That may mean that young people genuinely use fewer strategies, but it may also partly mean that we have started measuring something different. Self-report, like any method, has its limitations. And in this case, for example, older students may become more critical of their own behaviour. Their motivation may change, including their motivation to participate in this kind of research. And yes, asking someone what they think they do is simply not the same as observing what they actually do.
The authors explicitly point to this problem themselves. The shift from direct measures to self-report may explain part of the apparent decline and, simple as this may sound, it is something I hadn’t really thought much about before.
OK, and what does this mean for education?
As a researcher, I’m intrigued, but as someone working in education you may be thinking: great, even more uncertainty and nuance. Still, it is worth considering what all of this might mean. In secondary education, we generally expect more independence. Once students move to ‘big school’, they are expected to manage their own schedules, plan their homework, juggle different subjects, prepare for tests and increasingly decide for themselves how they are going to study. And we then hope that they do all of this effectively.
But expecting greater independence is not the same as teaching greater independence. The researchers also point out in their review that circumstances usually change once students enter secondary education. Students encounter more different teachers, less continuity, greater pressure from subject content, and this is often accompanied by less explicit attention to learning strategies.
All of this creates a small paradox: we give students more responsibility at precisely the moment when the support they receive in dealing with that responsibility may decrease. The authors therefore argue, and this may surprise you, for continued explicit instruction, modelling and scaffolding of self-regulated learning, including for older students.
And yet, that isn’t a revolutionary new message either. But it is one that is sometimes all too easily forgotten.