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TopSelf-Regulation In The Context Of Higher Education
Self-regulated learning has been widely studied in basic education. The convenience of students learning to plan, observe and assess their learning process has been defended since Bandura’s (1977) contribution regarding the sociocognitive learning perspective. Bandura (1986), who concreted three regulation subprocesses (self-observation, self-judgments and self-reactions), Pintrich (2000, 2003) and Zimmerman’s (2000, 2008) contributions, the study of self-regulated learning has been strengthened by other work, basically Boekaerts and collaborators (Boekaerts, 1997, Boekaerts & Niemivirta, 2000). Apart from these studies, considered to be already classics, Meuseb-Beekam, Joostenten Brinken, and Boshuizen (2015) have done an exhaustive documentary analysis from the studies that appear in Google Scholar, SpringerLink ERIC and Academic Research Elit in order to find out the characteristics of the interventions that foster self-regulation at primary and secondary level, as well as the role that assessment plays in self-regulation.
However, self-regulation has its own characteristics for each stage. Indeed, Meuseb-Beekman, Joosten-ten Brinken, and Boshuizen (2015) find distinguishing self-regulation features between primary and secondary students. Consequently, self-regulation has its specific characteristics in higher education (Cassidy, 2011). Self-regulated learning is believed to be important in higher education since it has been repeatedly found that higher achievers report using a wider range of self-regulated learning strategies, as well as their strategies are more complex than the ones used by lower achievers (Effeney, Carroll, & Bahr, 2013). Therefore, it is necessary to plan the teaching and learning of strategies for Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) to occur.
Two reasons seem to justify the current need for self-regulation within higher education framework. First, the heterogeneity of university students who access higher education (Smith, 2014) seems to make necessary to know how self-regulation processes are developed at degree level. In fact, Cassidy (2011) expresses the need to consider these processes to deal with diversity at university level. This author adapts the three constructs of self-regulated learning (learning style, control of learning beliefs and self-assessment) to higher education and makes some proposals for each of the three stages of self-regulation (planning, acting and self-assessing), emphasizing the relevance of self-regulation in higher education. Second, the competence-based approach implies designing learning and assessment tasks that are open, complex, challenging and contextualized, where there is a need for external support, taking decisions and/or solving problems (Strijbos, Engels, & Stuyven, 2015). Moreover, students need to comprehend and do something with the information they have (McNamara, 2011). Therefore, self-regulation plays a major role. In fact, among the main characteristics of competence-based assessment (Baartman, Bastians, Kirschner, & Van der Vleuten, 2006), it is highlighted its potential for self-regulating future learning processes if the responsibility of the learning process, as well as the use of feedback are placed on the student. For this reason, self-regulated learning must be considered a learning outcome to be developed progressively during university studies (Núñez, Solano, González-Pienda, & Rosario, 2006, Boud & Molloy, 2015).