The development and refinement of student self-regulatory strategies in online learning environments

Abstract

This paper reports on the initial stages of a doctoral research project investigating how higher education students develop and refine self-regulatory and cognitive learning strategies in the e-learning context. Studying in an e-learning platform requires the use and refinement of self-regulatory strategies that include activating prior knowledge, goal setting, as well as monitoring and regulating learning. A growing number of studies (Greene and Azevedo, 2010; Van Gog and Scheiter, 2010; Hadwin, Oshige, Gress, & Winne, 2010) have explored aspects of students’ cognitive strategies, self-regulation and metacognitive learning strategies in the e-learning and or hypermedia contexts. This longitudinal research project considers students’ e-learning strategies in varied e-learning environments across different sequenced courses. In this project, participants are asked to perform a simple learning task of their own choosing, a task performed in front of a computer augmented with an eye tracking system. Participants are then debriefed on their experience of the task, stimulated by watching their own eye movements. This paper will report the overall design of the research project, some considerations which informed this design, and present preliminary results from the initial period of data collection.