Janssen, Susan

Developing self-regulation skills is essential for learners. Yet learners do not develop SRL skills by themselves: external sources such as teachers and technologies play a critical role in training and developing young learners’ SRL skills. The majority of students in primary education practice math using adaptive learning technologies (ALTs). Even though ALTs partially take over regulation by adapting the difficulty of problems, learners are still required to monitor accuracy and select the appropriate level of effort. Teachers therefore still play an integral role in supporting students’ development of SRL.
For teachers, it is often difficult to accurately monitor students’ regulation during learning and the development of SRL over time. Research therefore shows that teachers only very limitedly provide instruction and feedback aimed at SRL. In this project, we propose to support teachers’ SRL instruction and feedback by offering teachers visualizations of students’ regulation processes. Two types of teacher dashboards will be developed: one aimed at classroom level SRL information (subproject 1), and one aimed at individual student SRL information (subproject 2). Subproject 1 will be carried out by the University of Utrecht, while subproject 2 will be carried out by Susan Janssen from the Radboud University.

The goal of the project is to investigate whether the dashboards enhance teachers’ instruction and feedback practices, and whether that in turn will lead to increased student learning and SRL skills. Thus, we focus on examining the role of teacher support and the facilitating role of technology for fostering students’ SRL. For each subproject, four studies are carried out that increase in ecological validity: a design study, lab study, and two classroom studies (short term and long term)