Promoting self-regulated learning in web-based learning environments

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Abstract

Self-regulated learning with the Internet or hypermedia requires not only cognitive learning strategies, but also specific and general meta-cognitive strategies. The purposes of the Study2000 project, carried out at the TU Dresden, were to develop and evaluate authoring tools that support teachers and students in web-based learning and instruction. This paper presents how the authoring tools of the Study2000 project can implement psychologically sound measures to promote (a) active and elaborated learning activities and (b) meta-cognitive activities in a web-based learning environment. Furthermore, it describes a study involving 72 university students in the use of such a web-based learning environment in a self-regulated learning setting at the university level. Results show that students spent almost 70% of their study time with texts, 11% with learning tasks and 12% with the active and elaborated learning tools, whereas meta-cognitive aids where hardly used (<1%).

Section snippets

Promoting self-regulated learning in web-based learning environments

The Internet is an open information system in which various sources of information, media and materials (i.e., texts, images, video sequences) can be linked together in diverse ways to form so-called hypertext or hypermedia environments. Thus, it offers new possibilities to structure, represent, adapt and integrate various learning content and materials. Furthermore, due to its interactivity, learners can process the material in accordance with their individual preferences and strategies at any

Challenges of self-regulated web-based learning

An important prerequisite to the promotion of self-regulated multimedia learning is the awareness of essential challenges. Based on a wide body of psychological research, the present analysis aims to attract attention to important factors contributing to the high demands of self-regulated learning with web-based learning environments (e.g., Boekaerts, 1997, Mayer and Moreno, 2002, Simons and de Jong, 1992).

Self-regulated learning refers to a learning situation in which learners, in addition to

Study2000 – promoting self-regulated hypermedia learning

Research in the field of self-regulated learning reveals that many learners fail to control and regulate their learning activities with hypermedia systems due to a deficit in the skills necessary to comply with the above-mentioned demands (see e.g., Azevedo, 2002, Chen and Rada, 1996, Dillon and Gabbard, 1998, Simons and de Jong, 1992). An analysis of the challenges posed by self-regulated hypermedia learning shows that various instructional interventions are necessary to promote learning with

How students use Study Desk tools

We conducted a study examining if and how students use the learning tools offered by Study Desk. Its main purpose was to investigate to what extent we succeeded with the above-described tools in initiating task and content-related learning activities (marking, note-taking and elaboration) and meta-cognitive activities (monitoring and evaluating the learning process and outcomes).

Discussion

This article described the implementation of instructional interventions into a web-based learning environment, known as Study Desk. The instructional interventions implemented, either embedded, non-embedded (Clarebout & Elen, 2006), or a combination of embedded and non-embedded tools, should foster self-regulated learning in web-based learning environments.

The results of our study show that there is a high variability in total working time. Whereas some students studied for only a few minutes,

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