Measuring Self-Regulated Learning by self-report and by learning task

Fostering of Learning Strategies (LS) is an explicit goal in the three-year curriculum of Vocational Education in Switzerland. Therefore, a case-study alike threeyear research and development program has been started focusing on the following research question: To which extent does the fostering of LS during the three years of school improve the students’ LS? In order to measure the continuous and final effects of this intensive LS-instruction, the students’ knowledge and use of LS has to be recorded before, during and after the intervention. Since the exclusive use of self-reports has been increasingly criticized, the students’ LS- knowledge and -use before intervention were measured by two means. (1) A LS-inventory was given to 100 students from two schools before any LS-instruction took place. (2) The students were given a specific learning task, asking them to write a summary about a newspaper-article on a consumer-issue, since summarizing is relevant for vocational students and the teaching of LS is emphasizing the cognitive strategies required. Afterwards, the students had to reflect on their task-specific LS-use and to evaluate their knowledge and use of different forms of summarizing in general. Both the summaries and the students’ self-reflections were analyzed by experts, focusing on the summary’s quality, its relation to LS-knowledge and the reflection of LS-use. Further on these outputs were compared to the students’ LS-profile. Qualitative as well as quantitative analyses were applied. The discussion will be twofold. (1) With regard to methodology: How far a LS-inventory is sensitive to show differences of the students’ strategies to summarize text material, and how far additional information can be gained by letting students perform a learning task? (2) With regard to instruction: To which extent planning and developing a LS-intervention can be tailored specifically to LS-knowledge and -use of students in vocational-education?