Assessing Students’ Self-regulatory Skills

Students’ ability to use self-regulatory learning skills is becoming increasingly important with the advent of web-based learning. Online courses delivered through the Web require students to take more ownership over how and when learning takes place, rather than tutors and lecturers making these decisions. This comes at a time when higher education institutions have increasing pressure to develop students’ life long learning and generic skills from both employers and funding authorities. In this paper we will investigate a conceptual framework for identifying students’ self-regulatory skills and consider a testing instrument to identify students strengths and weaknesses. The instrument can be administered online, from which a full analysis of the results is immediately returned to both student and tutor. From the 77 items used, a subset of these are selected and mapped to the six dimensions defined in the conceptual framework. The conceptual framework and associated questions related to each of the defined dimensions, provides a quick and convenient tool for assessing students’ self-regulatory skills. This mapping can help educators provide assessment and timely feedback to students at a time when there is a pronounced emphasis in higher education to provide skills and competencies that can be transferred to the workplace.