How-to-Integrate-Self-Regulated-Learning-into-Your-Courses-Transcript

How to Integrate Self-Regulated Learning into Your CoursesA Magna Online Seminar was presented on June 24, 2014 by Linda Nilson, Ph.D.. Rob Kelly: Hello, and welcome to Magna's Online S

How to Integrate Self-Regulated Learning into Your Courses

A Magna Online Seminar was presented on June 24, 2014 by Linda Nilson, Ph.D.

How to Integrate Self-Regulated Learning into Your Courses teaches

© 2014 Magna Publications Inc.

All rights reserved It is unlawful to duplicate, transfer, or transmit this program in any manner without written consent from Magna Publications.

The information contained in this online seminar is for professional development purposes but does not substitute for legal advice Specific legal advice should be discussed with a professional attorney

Rob Kelly: Hello, and welcome to Magna's Online Seminar How to Integrate

Self-Regulated Learning into Your Courses cosponsored by Magna

Publications and the Teaching Professor I'm Rob Kelly, Editor of the

Teaching Professor and today's moderator I'm pleased you could join us

If you haven't already printed the handouts, select the file you wish to

print from the file share box on the left of your screen, and then click the save to my computer button to download, open, and print it You may listen to this seminar through your computer, or you may choose to listen through your telephone To listen to your phone, dial the number and use the access code shown in the box at the bottom left of your screen

And now I'm pleased to introduce our presenter, Linda Nilson Linda Nilson is Founding Director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and

Innovation at Clemson University and author of Teaching at Its Best: A

Research-Based Resource for College Instructors now in its third edition

Dr Nilson has also published many articles and book chapters and has presented conference sessions and faculty workshops at colleges and universities both nationally and internationally on dozens of topics related

to teaching effectiveness, assessment, scholarly productivity, and academic careers Welcome, Linda Nilson

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: Thanks you very much, Rob It's a real pleasure to be here to talk with out

about self-regulated learning It's a topic that's really dear to my heart, so dear I wrote a book on it But the reason why is because I look at self-regulated learning as the closest thing to a magic bullet that we have for student learning

So here is the, here are the outcomes for you, the promise You're going to

be able to define self-regulated learning and also its three phases You're going to be able to wisely choose and set up activities and assignments that enhance your student's self-regulated learning skills, and you're going

to be able to put these in the proper places in your course, course components, the beginning, the end, you'll have a lot of choices

Another outcome for you is that you're going to be able to explain how and why self-regulated learning has the benefits that it does, and this includes benefits in terms of student learning, problem solving skills, exam performance, performance, the quality of student products, and also self-regulated learning reduces student overconfidence, which you've probably encountered You're also going to make very quick work of any kind of assessment that might be needed, and you don't always need assessment of these activities anyway

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Linda Nilson, Ph.D

Okay So what's self-regulated learning? It's the ability to plan, monitor, control, and evaluate one's learning for the purpose of maximizing your learning It has three stages, before, during, and after a learning or assessment experience

So in the first stage, you're talking about planning and goal setting for the activity that is, that a person's about to do, and at this stage, a learner should be asking questions like, at least on the cognitive side, what kind of

a task is this, what strategy should I use, what strategies have worked before for a similar task?

There's also an emotional side to this or meta-emotional How interested and motivated am I to do the task? And if I'm not feeling very motivated, how can I motivate myself? How can I realize or appreciate the value of what I'm going to be learning? And then there are the environmental factors where a learner will ask him or herself what's the best environment for the task that I'm going to be doing, and have I put any distractions far away?

So that's before It's assessing the setup that one has created for oneself During the learning or assessment activity, one is monitoring one's self, one's learning, one's progress, one's emotional state, one's physical setting, one's resources and asking one's self questions like am I making good progress? Am I sufficiently focused? Am I staying alert? How well are my strategies working?

On the emotional side, it's looking at, well, am I learning anything that really goes against my beliefs or my values? Am I resisting anything that I

am learning? And on the environmental side, just checking to see, let's see,

am I in a good physical position? Do I need a break? How well is this environment working for me?

And then, finally, in terms of evaluating one's learning at the end, after the activity, or one's strategy or the project or the goal that one had set out for oneself, and here the questions are looking at, you know, what material can I recall? What material can't I recall? What strategies seem to work very well?

Emotionally, it's looking at how one is reacting to one's metacognitive results So, gee, I didn't remember all that much I should go back and learn it But is this getting me down? Is this bad news inhibiting me from feeling confident enough to learn it? And then on the environmental side,

do I have to experiment with different parts of my physical environment to get better returns on my learning? So these are the sort of questions that one is asking along the way One is observing one's self learning

This is a list of self-regulated activities and assignments that we're going

to be at least touching on in this online seminar You'll see that some of them are for different times in the course, and some of them are attached

to different components of the course

Some of them are called wrappers, like they wrap around various components of the course, readings or a podcast, or live lectures or assignments, quizzes, exams And assignments in particular have two nicknames, they have meta-assignments as well as assignment wrappers

So this is what we're going to be looking at

Let's get the grading topic out of the way early You're going to have to be grading, probably on a rubric, major experiential assignments and any portfolios that you have students put together, yes, those But there aren't than many of those, and we're going to be touching on those They're attached to service learning and long simulations and role playing

Most of the assignments that we're going to be talking about here, you should be grading pass/fail So, really, you're checking the assignment in, you're not actually assessing it, you're not getting any kind of feedback, but you are setting the standards to begin with

So you're saying, okay, to get full credit, to get a full number of points, whether it be one point or ten points or whatever, the assignment has to be complete, and it has to be of a certain, minimum length So you have to write a certain amount in answer to these questions, or, perhaps you're just looking for a good faith effort But anything short of your standards gets zero points And for the students, this makes a more serious assignment for them So this is really going to count I really have to follow the directions, sure as they are I really have to do it right And, of course, with in-class activities, you won't be grading those at all

So let's look at a few activities and assignments for the beginning of a course Students don't really know a lot about learning and thinking, and

so it's a good idea, it can be one, to assign them some sort of a reading on learning and thinking, and I recommend a couple of them They are, at the very end of your bibliography, there's one by Robert Leamnson and another one by Wirth & Perkins

The one by Leamnson is particularly good, particularly accessible, easy to read, and it, you know, the major point that it makes is learning takes work Learning requires effort And, oftentimes, students did not have this experience of effort for learning when they were in high school

Another thing you can do in the start of the course is you can have students write a little essay called how I earned an A in this course This is

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misconceptions first

Another thing you could do at the start of the course is give them a knowledge survey, which is really a student confidence survey So you're giving them a series of questions or tasks covering the course or the material on the unit, because some people do these for every unit, and you're looking at the content and skills at different levels of thinking, so not just lower level, but also higher level like application and analysis You can get these questions or tasks from your list of outcomes, old final exams or midterms, handouts, exercises You have them do whatever And you're not asking them to do the task or answer the question but to assess their self-confidence to be able to do it Usually in three or four levels, from very confident to not at all confident, or from yes I can do this at an

A level to no, I don't even know what the question is asking I don't understand the vocabulary

Now do students know what they do and don't know? Most students don't have a good handle on it Your best students do, but most students will tend to overestimate their abilities and their knowledge, especially at the beginning of the course, when they know the least

This is, however, less likely in engineering and the sciences and more technical fields, because there is an esoteric vocabulary attached to them And students know that they've never heard of an ion before, but there are some terms that, say, in psychology like abnormal, gee, abnormal, yeah, I know what abnormal means But they don't know the term in psychology, what abnormal means to a psychologist They don't know that yet

So let's look first at reading wrappers that are perfectly appropriate for videos and podcasts as well, if you've been flipping your classroom There are reflective study questions that you can ask your students if they fall into different categories, but, really, you have to tailor these to the particular reading or listening or watching assignment

For instance, asking students what the most important concepts or principles in the reading are and also asking them to identify what they understand clearly That's a very important self-regulated learning activity

to know what you don't know, or, you know, what you're not grasping You can have students make some sort of comparisons or connections to what they already know, get them to hook on the new knowledge to the prior knowledge, or to examine their preconceptions in light of this new knowledge, or to connect what they're learning in your course to what they've learned in other courses

For instance, you can have them look at their emotional responses and look at their attitudes and values or their belief systems, and this will bring

in emotions, and this really helps students' memory of the material that they're learning, because it brings in new neurotransmitters, not just from the brain, but also from the limbic system

Another thing you can have your students do is called a self-testing procedure Read, Recall, Review You have students read the material through once, then to put away their books and notes, then to recall everything that they can recall, to recite it aloud, or if you want to make this homework, to write it down, and then they go back and review that reading for whatever they misunderstood or forgot

So you're getting them to go through it at least twice, but with a goal in mind, to learn what they didn't learn the first time Very effective Lots of research on Read, Recall, Review And what they found is in terms of learning fact-based passages on recalling them, it's way better than rereading again and again and again, the same read, or, and if note taking, but it takes a lot less time and effort than note taking

It gives students deliberate practice, that is practice with feedback, on how well they are learning the material, practice in retrieving the material, the more times you remember something, the more times you can remember

or the better you can remember it, and that feedback is absolutely immediate while they're still doing the task

Visual study tools are also good to complement readings, and they also make good lecture wrappers And here what we're talking about, we're talking about drawing pictures or maps or diagrams of the material, putting it in visual form We know from a lot of research that visual study tools improve reading comprehension by getting students on that

conceptual level They have to be able to develop the visual, because they're really having to pick out what's really important on a conceptual, more abstract level

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Linda Nilson, Ph.D

Visual study tools also foster long-term retention and make retrieval easier How do tools do that? Well, when students are putting together their own visual, they absolutely have to integrate that material and structure that knowledge on their own They have to organize it

And this is how we remember anything long-term It has to be organized

in our brains When we associate it with a visual, we can remember it longer Visuals are less taxing on the brain It requires, visuals require less working memory and fewer cognitive transformations that text does Imagine, if you will, taking 5,000 words, and, especially if you're not that strong a reader for a second-year student, making sense of that trying to get a picture of the organization from that versus just developing a visual

as you are reading It's really boiling down what is important You have to pick out what's important And then once you have that visual

organization, that picture, the visual itself will cue the text and the details

in the text Visuals are amazing tools

I'm going to show you some pictures of common visuals or maps This first one is a sort of a template of a flowchart Flowcharts show the sequence of events or operations It can show a causal process or a procedural process There are concept circle diagrams, for instance, Venn diagrams We're usually familiar with those

But there are all different kinds of concept circle diagrams that show the relationships among concepts, categories, principles, topics in terms of, you know, what's overlapping and what isn't overlapping at all, what's partially overlapping Then there are matrices Matrices are like tables, but they enable the students to classify the information or the knowledge or to compare and contrast different types of whatever you're having them learn

So this is a visual that has to do with comparing wars on different facets of war like the cause and the effects of war This is, of course, a cycle, some

of your material might fall into cycle form This is a concept map, perfect for when the material falls into a hierarchical organization, where you put the most occlusive general or abstract concept or principle, it works with principles as well, at the top, and then you work your way down the hierarchy or the map, the concept map, to the more specific ones, exclusive, narrow, concrete ones right down to examples

A mind map is similar, but it also can be used for free association, or you can use it for a hierarchy And here the central concept goes not at the top but in the middle These are some examples of the sorts of, of pieces of concept maps or mind maps, and note there are words associated with the lines, and that's a good idea to have your students specify exactly what the

relationship is And this first example, weather, well, a major type of weather is precipitation There are other kinds of weather There are other kinds of precipitation too, rain is simply the liquid form, so that's an example

Now we're going to do our very first activity Now if you've listened to the first part of this online seminar, and I want you to take the role of a student listening to a lecture, and this is also foreshadowing an activity that you might do with your students during a live lecture

What I want you to do is to put your notes away, put your handouts away, and I want you to write down all the important points so far that you can recall and enter any questions into the chat And if you are with a group of people, to take it to that step further which is what you would do with your students in class, and to work with a partner to help each other remember Just fill in the blanks of what you can remember and also to answer one another's questions So I'm going to give you a minute to do that, at least a minute to do that, to write down all of those important points, and then to enter any questions into the chat

Rob Kelly: Okay We'll give it a little more time I see that there are several people

typing, so we'll give them a little bit

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: Okay Great This is good You're remembering a lot

Rob Kelly: Okay Let me share a little bit of this, not a question but a comment This

would work well with incoming nursing students who don't know the language

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: Yes And it would get them to start using that language, and, again,

practice and recalling it This is practice and retrieval, and it's also direct feedback as to what you learned and what you didn't learn, what you understood, and what you didn't understand Is it a self-testing procedure? Self-testing is so powerful

Rob Kelly: I can see that people are still typing They're certainly putting some

thought into this

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: That's great

Rob Kelly: Okay Well, here's one Self-regulated learning as three stages, before,

during, and after Grading reflection activities

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: Oh, I think you're putting in the chat what you're recalling, and I just

wanted questions in the chat You can recall You can just scribble on any

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Linda Nilson, Ph.D

piece of paper, on the back of your handouts or whatever what you can recall But I’m glad to hear you're recalling all these things I really am very happy to hear this

Rob Kelly: Here's a question Are these responses, especially emotional responses,

shared with others in the class?

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: Not necessarily Maybe with you, maybe with you, because you might

find you might be getting a certain kind of important feedback from your students, because you might want to know those But, no, they're not necessarily meant to be shared at all In fact, it might be safer if you don't,

if, what the students don't share, if you don't happen to share it

Rob Kelly: Okay It appears that many of the activities mentioned so far deal with

students working outside of class Is this correct?

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: What we're going to be talking about now will be in class, because we're

going to be looking at live lecture wrappers But before, we were talking about reading wrappers and podcast, yes, that was all outside of class

Rob Kelly: Okay I think that's about it I don't see anyone else typing So I think we

can move on

Linda Nilson, Ph.D.: Okay Great All right So let's launch into live lecture wrappers We just

did this It's called periodic free recall, a self-testing procedure You have the directions you can give to your students It's a very powerful

technique, and, of course, it gets students working together

Here's another one Active listening checks And this goes on in class And what you do, you tell the students to listen for key points that you're

making and take notes as well, that's fine, then you have them push their notes away, close their notebooks, and recall, write down the most important points

And, usually, we're talking about three most important points, okay, good example, and to turn those in to you, so you can see what they thought Well, that's not really the idea The idea is, is you then, in class, review those three most important points, and then students assess their own listening skills

From the first to the third time, this was done in some research by Martha Lovett, first time 45% of the students got all the three points correct By the third time, 75% did They got used to listening to you and more used

to picking out what was important So this is very useful for them to learn how to listen to you

Then there are minute papers, and this would be something that you'd usually have them do at the end of a mini lecture or, perhaps, at the end of

a longer lecture, at the end of class, even after activities, really

So here you'll be asking them, and you can take your pick of these, what's the most important or valuable or useful thing that you learned today, what are the most important points, what surprised you, or what was unexpected

to you, what ideas struck you as something you should practice, put in practice now, what ideas stand out in your mind, what helped or hindered your understanding?

And this not only has, some of these things have some, an emotional dimension as well, and that's good, but it also gets them to review the lecture or your mini lecture This is wonderful Me review is really an important part of learning and remembering It's getting students to elaborate on that new material, and its elaboration starts to move material from the working memory into long-term memory And, of course, that's what you want That's what real learning is, when you can remember something

Okay Let's look at meta-assignments or assignment wrappers, and let's start with problem solving, math-based problem solving There are a couple of things you can do for your students to help them make that leap from what you were saying in class or what the book said to actually being able to do the problems, because, oftentimes, it's difficult for students to make that leap Hey, they understood what was in the book, they

understood what you were saying, but they can't make the leap to doing the problems

Get them to start on the problems in class in pairs where they think aloud their approach to the problem, they talk through the problem with a partner, and the partner helps them So they talk that through They're not necessarily doing the problem That's their homework Right? And then get them to start on a second problem where the pairs can switch roles Very useful to get students over that hump of being able to apply the material

Another thing you can do, and there's research on this, you can get students to just put down on their homework their confidence level before they solved the problem and their confidence level after they solved the problem And, usually, this will help students notice when they are overconfident

Because, you, yeah, I can do that problem It looks just like some problem you worked out in class, but then they realize, no, it's a little bit different They can't transfer it They might work on the problem, they should work

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Then there are meta-assignments for papers and projects, and these are just

a number of things you can do, but, of course, it depends on the assignment as to what would be most appropriate And there are other alternatives as well

So if they're doing a research process, or it's a writing process where they're doing a lot of planning in the writing, have them make a record of what they're doing Write down the steps they're taking Write down the strategies that they have, they're adopting to do this assignment, the problems they're encountering along the line, and how they're overcoming those problems So they actually are writing down what they are observing themselves doing They're keeping track of the process

If you're giving them a fuzzy problem to solve, let's say a case to debrief

or a problem-based learning problem to solve, get them to write about their reasoning How did they decide to define the problem the way they did? How did they come up with alternative solutions, and how did they deem one better than the rest? What reasoning did they go through? So they're recording that

Have them, at the end of the assignment, talk about the skills they gained

or improved to the assignment, and when these skills might be useful to them in their lives and the future Have them evaluate their work, have them self-assess, look at their strengths and weaknesses, look at their progress, look at their achievements And, of course, this is a sort of a reflection that goes into portfolios So this might be part of students building a portfolio as well

Have students paraphrase your feedback You might be surprised to find out what they're misunderstanding or what they're skipping But if you're worried about your students not reading your feedback, get them to paraphrase it They'll have to read it Right? And give them some sort of, you know, three points or whatever for doing it properly, three points or

no points, right, pass/fail

Linda Nilson, Ph.D

If they're going to revise a paper, have them write down their goals for the revision and their strategies for revising it, and that way they will

approach the task in an organized way So this is a planning activity

After the assignment, have them reflect on why it was valuable, what they learned, and what they're going to do differently to do the task better next time they have a similar assignment And this is a way to really motivate your students to think about what they were doing on the assignment Have them write advice for the next cohort of students Have them reflect

on, okay, this is how they prepared, these are the strategies they used, these are the strategies that did work, these are the strategies that didn't, these are the mistakes you can make along the line, so avoid them, and this

is the value of the assignment They will give good advice to the students who are coming up

Now let's talk about meta-assignments for experiential learning like service learning, fieldwork, engagement, simulations, role plays And these are often fairly substantial assignments, so these you might be grading on a rubric, but it depends on how substantial the experiential learning experience actually is

Okay One thing you can have them do is to have them connect the experience to the course, the course content, the course outcomes, because oftentimes students will get carried away with the experience and not make that course connection unless they are told to do so This is particularly true of service learning

You can have them monitor and describe their self-regulated learning behaviors and activities in the course of the experiential learning experience You can have them explain their goals and strategies, and, you know, why they made the decisions that they did, how they responded to other players

This would be perfect for their debriefing of a long simulation or a substantial role play, because it has to do with how they responded to other players Or you could have them simply assess how well they achieved their goals, how well their strategies worked, and what they thought of their own performance, and then how they might do better next time

Let's do a section activity now And this is an awareness-raising, minute paper And, again, you don't have to think about writing a paper You can write a sentence But in the chat, I'd like you to answer this prompt How does the material you've heard so far connect with or