MANAGING AND IMPROVING OWN LEARNING

Managing and Improving Own learning

Managing and Improving Own Learning

Planning

In recent years, personal or self-learning has been recognized both nationally and internationally as an important construct in education. It has attracted the attention of researchers and educators alike. As a result, a variety of theories and models have emerged to describe the role of self-regulated learning in academic success. My learning is the deliberate planning, monitoring, and regulating of cognitive, behavioral, and affective or motivational processes toward completion of my academic task. During this process I am guided by environmental or contextual features of the task and by my own personal beliefs and goals. Self-learners like me are intentional learners who choose targets or goals and make plans for their learning. These learners are strategic in adopting and adapting a range of tools and strategies to improve learning. They check their progress and intervene when things are not going as planned. One way to think about self-regulated learning is to think of conducting experiments about your own learning. If I identify a problem, I should make hypotheses, and set goals. To achieve those goals, I must make plans and set procedures in action. As I am working, I collect informal data about how things are going. By tracking what is happening to your initial goals and hypotheses, you draw conclusions about your progress. Based on my conclusion I may make changes to my initial plans and procedures or revise previously set hypotheses. Thus, when things do not go as planned, I begin another cycle of experimentation. When this recursive process is applied to learning, I can call it my own learning. My weekly timetable has always helped me to put myself on track and do my best in my academic life. My attendance and punctuality has made me famous in my class and that's why every teacher likes me.

For own learning, students like me need to be encouraged to monitor and evaluate their own progress rather than relying solely on external evaluation. Self-evaluation is important because it requires students to revisit task perceptions and articulate goals and standards they are using to evaluate themselves.

Zimmerman (1989, 2000) describes self-regulated learners as those who are motivationally, cognitively, and behaviorally active in their own learning. These learners persist when faced with difficulties or challenges and experiment or test different strategies in order to optimize learning outcomes. Self-regulated learning is also conceptualized as a lifelong process, meaning SRL develops and improves over time and across tasks. Perhaps more important, research shows that students can learn to become self-regulated; productive self-regulation is learned and refined under supportive instructional conditions.

Expectations

Although there is some debate about how motivation weaves into self-regulatory processes, there is fairly consistent agreement that motivation plays an important role in self-regulated learning. Motivation is a complex construct. It includes outcome expectations, judgments of efficacy, attributions, and incentives or values.

There are at least three ways motivation weaves in my own learning. First, motivational knowledge and beliefs inform self-regulated learning by influencing ...