“OK, how many of you were overconfident about this question? I want to see someone who wrote down a 4 or 5 for confidence.”
Grazyna Niezgoda, a veteran instructor at New York City College of Technology, is reviewing an algebra quiz in front of a crowded section of developmental mathematics—a noncredit course for students who have failed the City University of New York’s mathematics entrance test. If these students want to stay at City Tech, they need to pass that test.
Across the country, many students trip on obstacles like this. But after a decade of trial and error, Ms. Niezgoda and her colleagues believe they have found an effective way to help people through. The technique is “self-regulated learning,” a series of steps that encourage students to evaluate how they study and notice where they are going wrong.
There is strong evidence of success. In a rare example of a randomized controlled trial in higher education, researchers based at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York found that developmental-math students at City Tech were signif-icantly more likely to pass the entrance test if they were assigned to a section that used the self-regulated learning technique.
During the last several years, these scholars have trained college instructors in New Jersey, Ohio, and at several CUNY campuses to use the technique. The focus has been on remedial math, but the researchers have also deployed their methods in courses in composition, nursing, sociology, and mechanical engineering.
“We’re trying to document the role of processes that are different from standard student-outcome measures and standard ability measures,” says Barry J. Zimmerman, a professor of educational psychology at the Graduate Center and a principal architect of the self-regulated-learning project. “We’re interested in various types of studying, setting goals for oneself, monitoring one’s progress as one goes through learning a particular topic.”
The process baffles and annoys some students at first. “But by the end of the course,” Ms. Niezgoda says, “they realize—at least most of them realize—that it works out for their benefit.”
A Hard Look at Study Habits
The project was born in the late 1990s, when John Hudesman, a clinical psychologist who had worked for almost 25 years as a counselor at City Tech, told his colleagues that he planned to retire. But at the last minute he was persuaded to stay by Marcela K. Armoza, an administrator who was preparing to take the reins of a student-support center.
“She called me into her office and said, ‘I want to do something that will put us on the map. If you find a project we can work with, I’ll support you financially,’” Mr. Hudesman says. “From an administrator, that was suspect and unusual. But Marcela was as good as her word.”
Mr. Hudesman asked around about scholars who had important insights on student learning, and he was directed to Mr. Zimmerman. “Two or three of us went up to meet with Barry, and he started to describe self-regulated learning,” he says. “And literally two or three minutes into his presentation, I turned to one of my colleagues and said, ‘We’re betting the ranch on this.’ I mean, as you as you hear Barry present this material, you know there’s something there.”
Mr. Zimmerman has spent most of his career examining what can go wrong when people try to learn new facts and skills. His work centers on two common follies: First, students are often overconfident about their knowledge, assuming that they understand material just because they sat through a few lectures or read a few chapters. Second, students tend to attribute their failures to outside forces (“the teacher didn’t like me,” “the textbook wasn’t clear enough”) rather than taking a hard look at their own study habits.
Everyone in education is familiar with those mistakes, which are often assumed to be eternal and irremediable. But Mr. Zimmerman insists otherwise: Explicitly coaching students to think about their study processes and to monitor their learning can pay large dividends.
That might sound like a recipe for banal lectures about study skills. But training students to monitor their learning involves much more than simple nagging, Mr. Zimmerman says.
For one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses. For that reason, math classes like Ms. Niezgoda’s feature quizzes in almost every session.
And when students make errors, they need to be coached to reflect on exactly where they went wrong, lest they hold on to bad intellectual habits. Each week in Ms. Niezgoda’s class, students are required to rework at least two of their incorrect quiz problems. In those exercises, they must write a sentence or two about the correct strategy to use for each problem, and they must show that they can solve a similar problem.
“We’ve defined these as Barry’s two golden rules,” Mr. Hudesman says. “The first one is, Give students fast, accurate feedback about how they’re doing. And the second rule, which is less familiar to most people, is, Now make them demonstrate that they actually understand the feedback that has been given.”
Mr. Hudesman, who is now a senior investigator at CUNY’s Center for Advanced Study in Education and an adjunct professor of student affairs at City Tech, has spent the last several years overseeing two large federal grants. One of those grants supported pilot projects in self-regulated learning at Rutgers University at Newark, the University of Cincinnati, Youngstown State University, and CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College.
The second grant, which came from the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm, was for a controlled experiment in City Tech’s developmental and introductory math courses. In each course, students were randomly assigned to sections that did or did not use the self-regulated techniques. In both courses, students in the self-regulated sections were significantly more likely to pass the final exam, and they also demonstrated more awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses in particular areas of mathematics.
Both of those federal grants came to an end last year. But at every campus where the technique has been introduced, at least a few instructors are continuing to use the method, according to Mr. Hudesman. “I did a survey in December,” he says. “Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique ‘somewhat,’ and eight said ‘a lot.’ So we were pleased that they didn’t forget about us after the program ended.”
‘Junkies for Feedback’
Charlotte Skinner, an assistant professor of mathematics at Raymond Walters College, a two-year branch of the University of Cincinnati, has been using the self-regulated-learning technique for four years. “After each exam, we help students adjust their study habits,” she says. “Did you do as well as you expected? If not, why not? What are you going to do differently?”
But sounding too much like a guidance counselor, Ms. Skinner says, sometimes annoys students. “If you just talk about study habits, students resist that, naturally. It has an element of, Oh, we’re still in high school. And over time, we’ve realized that these methods have a much greater effect if they’re embedded within the course content. Once I made that shift, and began to focus on getting them to analyze and correct their errors on specific types of math problems and their ability to understand mathematical language—once I tied into course content—there was much less resistance. And I think that’s key.”
Sara Crosby, a composition instructor at City Tech, agrees. “Once we focus on noticing and correcting errors in whatever writing strategy we’re working on, the students just become junkies for feedback,” she says. “They’ve found a language for talking about these things. When we talk about body paragraphs, instead of saying something vague like, ‘It’s not long enough,’ they’ll learn to say, ‘There wasn’t enough evidence,’ or ‘That anecdote didn’t work.’ And that’s sort of thrilling.”
In developmental-writing classes like Ms. Crosby’s, the self-regulated-learning technique has not yet been tested by a full-blown randomized experiment. But there is still reasonably strong evidence for its success, according to Mr. Hudesman. Across a five-semester period, City Tech students in developmental-writing sections that used self-regulated learning passed CUNY’s writing exam at a rate that was 18 percentage points higher than the rate for City Tech students in normal sections of the course.
Ms. Armoza, the administrator who originally persuaded Mr. Hudesman to stay and is now City Tech’s vice president for enrollment management and student affairs, is also gratified by the project’s success. “At a certain point I realized that tutoring and counseling are not enough,” she says. “I thought that we needed to be more intrusive, and I thought that we needed to build specific skills.”
Even if they do not adopt the elaborate procedures that are used in City Tech’s math classes, Mr. Zimmerman says, instructors should do more to explicitly coach students to be conscious of their learning processes. College students of all types, not just obviously struggling students who are assigned to remedial classes, will learn better if they think critically about their own studying.
“Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection,” Mr. Zimmerman says. “We’re trying to help instructors and students see errors not as an endpoint, but as a beginning point for understanding what they know and what they don’t know, and how they can approach problems in a more effective way.”
