Inquiry Resources

Self-regulation and time management: Monkeys, Monsters and the Student

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On a practicum visit last semester, I was introduced to this TED talk by Tim Urban. Funny, exceedingly accurate and very well illustrated, it made me ponder my own struggles with procrastination and those of others, including my students. I highly recommend you watch the video if you have the time.

A (very) brief summary for those who didn’t watch the video:

Urban describes the brain of a procrastinator as having parts: the Rational Decision Maker and the Instant Gratification Monkey. The Rational Decision Maker has all the intentions of doing work to meet deadlines, but the Instant Gratification Monkey interrupts and always brings the person off task down a spiral of useless YouTube videos. When the deadline has approached, the Panic Monster steps in and scares everyone. The Instant Gratification Monkey runs away and the Rational Decision Maker is put into overdrive to complete all the tasks necessary to make the Panic Monster leave.

Don’t you wish you had watched the video now? 🙂

Experiences with Monkeys, Monsters and the Student: 

I am a self-proclaimed self-regulated person: I set goals to meet deadlines, I plan how I will achieve these goals, and I reflect once the process is over on how I could improve next time. The most important point in this process is the plan. My plans consist of two strategies: break the task into smaller units with individual deadlines, and assign each deadline a reward. This system allows me to combat my Instant Gratification Monkey because I consistently have gratification waiting at the end of a goal, along with the immense feeling of satisfaction at completing a goal. Some rewards are small (watching an episode of The Office or eating some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) while other rewards are large (going out with friends for the evening or going away for the weekend). These rewards work sometimes, but frequently the Instant Gratification Monkey strikes and I’ll be up watching cat videos all evening.

I bring up my own struggles because the Instant Gratification Monkey plays a role in all of our lives. No one is immune to the Instant Gratification Monkey and if you claim you are, you are just lying to yourself. Some people can combat the monkey better than others depending on their motivation and self-regulation. My question is: are adolescents more prone to give in to the hands of the Instant Gratification Monkey? Adolescents have less experience dealing with deadlines, focus on extrinsic rewards much more heavily than adults do, and are experiencing information, media and entertainment instantaneously at all hours of the day.

The skills that I use to combat the Instant Gratification Monkey are self-regulation skills. Time management is a key skill that many people I know and have interacted with fail to have, all claiming that it is a skill that they were not taught in school. I think it is more important now than ever to teach our students about time management. If gratification is frequently at our finger tips, how can we ever be effective learners or workers?

The future of procrastinators:

Urban’s final comments in the video were about two types of procrastination: deadline versus non-deadline. When people procrastinate without deadlines, people watch their life go by waiting for them to participate. This has to do with a person’s motivations; those that are intrinsically motivated do not procrastinate on life, they live it to its fullest. My hope is to instill intrinsic motivation in the classroom as well in the lives of my students, so that our future is full of life go-getters who only give in to the Instant Gratification Monkey to procrastinate deadlines, not life.

Urban, T. (2016, Feb.) Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator. Retrieved 10 Jan 2017 from https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator

Self-assessment and the self-regulating student

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Thinking about how to incorporate self-regulated learning (SRL) skills and study strategies into the classroom has brought me to a component of teaching and learning: self-assessment. I want to incorporate SRL skills and study strategies into my teaching so that students can be more effective learners and are more efficient at studying with the goal of achieving more on their summative assessments. I have already planned on using study strategies as means of formative assessment throughout a unit, an example of assessment for learning. After reading John A. Ross’ “The reliability, validity and utility of self-assessment,” I believe that using SRL skills as assessment as learning through self-assessments of assignments can help enhance student’s self-regulation skills and can improve their self-efficacy.

Why self-regulation and self-assessment go hand in hand:

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” – John Dewey

Students who are self-regulated learners monitor their learning process, set goals and use effective strategies to meet them, and modify their behaviors based on feedback (Zimmerman, 1990). I believe that self-assessment can be an effective tool for students to monitor their (academic) progress by providing themselves feedback on where they need to improve or change their strategies and behaviors. This is a clear example of assessment as learning as student are able to reflect on their efforts, evaluate their performance and determine their strengths and weaknesses.

What the research has to say:

Ross’ article is a review of research on student self-assessment. One of the main findings was that self-assessment can contribute to increased achievement and improved behavior in students (pg. 5). Ross summarizes the three processes that self-regulated students use to monitor, interpret and modify their behavior:

1. self-observation (i.e. focus only on areas that are being assessed),
2. self-judgement (i.e. determining if and how well they met their goals), and
3. self-reaction (i.e. interpreting their level of satisfaction based on their goal achievements).

The central finding of Ross’ review was that the reliability, validity and utility of self-assessment can be enhanced by teaching students how to properly assess their work (pg. 5). Ross outlined the self-assessment training that he has used, that I hope to be able to implement into my teaching practice (pg. 4-5):

1. involve the students in defining assessment criteria (e.g. for assignments that they will self-assess),
2. teach students how to apply their created criteria (e.g. model an application of the rubric),
3. give students meaningful feedback on their self-assessments (e.g. discuss differences between self-assessment and teacher-/peer-assessment), and
4. guide students on how to use their assessments to develop action plans (e.g. help students create short- and long-term goals, as well as what strategies they can use to achieve their goals).

Ross also indicates the positive effect self-assessment training can have on student self-efficacy. Ross states that when students are learned in self-assessment and teachers foster self-assessment through rubric design, students can perceive themselves as successful, interpreting their performance as mastery (pg. 6). Self-efficacy is enhanced vicariously in the classroom when self-assessment is incorporated into assessment, such as when students are given more responsibility and ownership in their learning by creating rubrics (pg. 6).

Using self-assessment in my teaching practice:

Based on Ross’ review, I intend to use self-assessments with my students to enhance their self-regulation skills, monitor their self-efficacy, and provide another source of feedback. Self-assessment is a great method of tracking student learning goals (both curriculum and their own) and offers a method for me to provide guiding feedback on how they can incorporate new skills or behaviors to achieve their goals.

Citations:

Ross, J. A. (2006). The reliability, validity and utility of self-assessment. Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 11(10), 1-13.

Zimmerman, B. (1990). Self-regulated learning and academic achievement: An overview. Educational Psychologist, 25(1), 3-17.

Motivation means business

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Heads up: this video is all about businesses, financial rewards and success, mixed in with some really great thoughts on motivation that can easily be applied into teaching practice.

Dan Pink’s TED talk spoke of the importance of intrinsic motivation in the workplace: the more motivated workers were to do their jobs well, the better they worked. Now I’m not relating school to a workplace, but they often share similar characteristics. Many big businesses offer financial bonuses for good performance. Students are offered monetary scholarships for good performance. At the non-monetary level, students can be offered treats, gold stars, or even material goods. What Pink shares in his video is that research says time and time again that the extrinsic motivator system prevalent in the workplace is not conducive to better work practice. I believe that this can be extended down to the school level, where intrinsic motivation should always be fostered.

Intrinsic motivation is another self-regulation skill that is imperative for student success. Pink states that there are three main parts to fostering intrinsic motivation in the workplace: autonomy, mastery and purpose. These three elements are also essential to a student’s education. Students who have choice in their learning and assessment are more engaged; they have ownership over their education because it is for them and they are creating it. When students are held accountable for their learning, their intrinsic motivation will drive them to succeed rather than that coveted gold star. Mastery is equally as important as it allows students to fully gain a new skill or acquire new knowledge – they have not memorized another fact for a test that can be forgotten the day later. If students feel they have mastered a topic, they have achieved a higher self-efficacy which can lead to higher performance. Finally, intrinsic motivation is hard to develop if one does not have a purpose. Students need to be told why they are learning each topic, what they can do with these skills and knowledge, and how they can apply this in the present and future. Students who have a purpose feel more connected to those in the classroom and are more interested in success for the sake of success, not the gold star they have been trained to want.

I hope to foster intrinsic motivation in my students by making the curriculum relevant to their interests, giving students some autonomy in how they learn and the assignments they complete, and by investing students in the purpose of my classroom – to use new knowledge and skills to continually create a better world. I plan on monitoring student motivation through self-reflections throughout my practicum, to see if their motivations change based on topics, activities, and/or assignments. I know that it’s idealistic to be able to do all of these things in only a few weeks, but I hope that I can foster intrinsic motivation in my students for them to carry forward in their future and apply to the aspect of their life that is their passion.

Pink, D. (2009, Jul). Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation. Retrieved 9 Jan 2017 from https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation

Retroactive: Self-regulated learning skills and problem solving

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One part of my inquiry is about how to implement self-regulated learning skills and study strategies into my inquiry. Prior to research, I decided that there are three possible ways: a lecture on the skills, incorporating the skills into assignments, and as supportive workshops throughout a year. I am most curious about incorporating skills as assignments as I believe that you learn by doing, and what better way to learn skills than incorporate them into the curriculum. While I could not find any research that talked about the benefits of this method, Zepeda and Richey’s research outlined below is representative of incorporating skills into work in the sciences.

The research: 

The authors investigated how an intervention to teach the self-regulated learning skills of planning, monitoring and evaluation to middle school science students would affect student metacognition, motivation, and learning. The intervention design was such that the experimental group received individual packages that taught them self-regulation skills in addition to physics practice problems, whereas the control only received physics practice problems. Both groups were given many packages over the course of the year, and without instruction from their teacher were asked to answer the problems to the best of their abilities. The results of the study found that students who participated in the experimental group reported an increased student declarative knowledge of metacognition, an increase in self-efficacy, and higher achievement in practice problems and further application of metacognitive skills.

What this means for my inquiry? 

The results of this study are counter-intuitive: those with more practice did worse than those who had less practice. This only feeds my inquiry – teach students to study better, not harder. I don’t believe that practice makes perfect, but that efficient practice does. The students who reflected on their work, engaging their metacognition and employing their learned self-regulated skills, saw increases not only in academic achievement but also in self-efficacy.

As for implementation, I am now looking to incorporate planning, monitoring and evaluation into assignments to encourage these behaviors. In order for this to be effective, I need to teach students how to plan, monitor and evaluate their work in class to ensure that students understand what they are doing and why it is beneficial. I would like to incorporate this into practice problems as formative assessment, or even learning activities where students are practicing new skills with their peers in class.

Reference:

Zepeda, C. D., & Richey, J. E. (2015). Direct instruction of metacognition benefits adolescent science learning, transfer, and motivation: An in vivo study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(4), 954-970.

 

Retroactive: Science Reflection Journals

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A large component of self-regulated learning is self-awareness in one’s strengths, weaknesses, and plans. While trying to find ways to encourage self-regulated behaviors that were easily monitorable, I stumbled across a research paper: The Effect of Reflective Science Journal Writing on Students’ Self-Regulated Learning Strategies by N. Al-Rawahi and S. Al-Balushi.

The research: 

Their study found that students who wrote in science reflective journals showed a significant increase in self-regulation strategy use compared to a control group. Al-Rawahi and Al-Balushi used a template journal (see figure 1, pg. 372 for their template). The template consisted of six areas: my lesson objectives, my observations, my dialogue with others, my main conclusions from this lesson, at the end of this lesson I feel that, and my evaluation. Each section had sentence prompts for students to complete, but then gave ample additional room for students to add more. They focused heavily on monitoring and evaluating understanding of content, an important part of self-regulated learning. The limitations to using such a template is that students are only going to write exactly what they are asked about. It does not allow for students to explore other thoughts and feelings that they may have outside the context of the content and classroom, which could have an impact on their learning.

What this means for my inquiry:

I am eager to use reflective journals as a means of increasing self-regulation skills and self-efficacy, but I would not follow the same template that was outlined in the paper. I want my students to be able to express themselves however they feel is best – writing in a journal, on a blog, audio recordings, etc. I would use similar prompts outlined in the article, but I may add more specific prompts so I can assess their development of these skills over time. I would also not have students fill this out after every class, but at least twice a week. Students are welcome and encouraged to write more frewuently, but I would not impose it on the students as I know that they are already very busy and this may be a hard sell for a lot of the students. I would “mark” the journals for completeness and thoroughness, and give them completion marks. Hopefully this extrinsic motivator will initially get the ball rolling so that intrinsic motivation will take over once students see the benefits.

Reference:

Al-Rawahi, N. M., & Al-Balushi, S. M. (2015) The Effect of Reflective Science Journal Writing on Students’ Self-Regulated Learning Strategies. International Journal of Environmental And Science Education, 10(3), 367-379.