The Effects of Design Strategies for Promoting Students' Self-Regulated Learning Skills on Students' Self-Regulation and Achievements in Online Learning Environments

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of design strategies for promoting students’ self-regulated learning skills on students’ self-regulation and achievements. Seven strategies for promoting students’ SRL are identified through the literature review and applied into the experimental group: goal setting, self-evaluation, self-monitoring, cognitive strategies, resource management, self-efficacy and volition. Students were assigned into the control and experimental group. Independent samples T-test and semi-structured interview were conducted to analyze the effects of the design strategies. Implications to promote SRL in online learning environment were discussed. Recently, self-regulated learning (SRL) has emerged as an important issue in educational circles (Boekaerts, 1999; Schunk, 2000; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1998). Self-regulated learning is students’ active learning processes in meta-cognition, motivation, and behavior (Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1986). Selfregulated learning skills are critical for students to succeed in learning not only in traditional learning environments, but also in web-based learning environments. This is particularly true in online learning environments, where students basically learn by themselves without face-to-face instruction and immediate help from teachers. In addition, from the perspective of lifelong learning, the needs for E-learning have been increasing. This relatively unfamiliar learning environment can be challenging to students. Therefore, promoting students’ SRL skills is something that instructional designers should consider when they design online learning courses. Zimmerman, Bonner, and Kovach (1996) argued that students’ self-regulation can be taught and improved through the students’ own efforts. However, promoting students’ self-regulation is not an easy task because it requires them to spend a lot of time and energy. In addition, promoting self-regulation is only possible when students experience the benefits of self-regulation (Zimmerman, Bonner & Kovach, 1996). Many researchers argued that the effective way to improve students’ SRL skill is to embed SRL strategies into the context. This is because students do not apply the learned SRL skills into their learning context after they learned self-regulated learning skills. Also, it is important to have students experience (Zimmerman, Bonner & Kovach, 1996) and use the designed SRL skills into their learning. It is true that many students even don’t click a designed content or button and ignore many important learning events designed for them (Lim, 2002). Many researchers (Ley & Young, 2001; Zimmerman, Bonner & Kovach, 1996) suggested the following four design principles to promote students’ self-regulated learning skills: (1) The SRL activities need to be explicitly delivered to students. (2) Students should have opportunities to utilize learned SRL strategies in real learning situations. (3) Intervention to promote students’ SRL skills should be mandatory or strongly structured. (4) Having students successfully experience SRL skills is needed for regular application of SRL skills in their actual learning. What self-regulated learning skills are critical? Self-regulated learning strategies consist of cognitive and meta-cognitive activities, resource management activities, and affective activities (Zimmerman and Martinez, 1986; Pintrich, 1999). Corno and Mandinach (1983) viewed self-regulated learning as a deliberate planning and monitoring process and emphasized the importance of cognitive and meta-cognitive activities for self-regulated learning. Cognitive activities refer to rehearsal, elaboration, and organization (Hofer, Yu, and Printrich, 1998; Yang, 2000). According to Printrich (1999), rehearsal strategies are recitation of items to be learned, saying the word aloud when students read, and highlighting or underlining the text, elaboration strategies are paraphrasing or summarizing the material, and organizational strategies are selecting the main ideas and outlining the text. Cognitive activities vary depending on the learning domain. With cognitive activities, meta-cognitive activities are critical for self-regulated learning. If cognitive