Improving Higher Education Students’ Learning Proficiency by Fostering their Self-regulation Skills

A major challenge for education and educational research is to build on our present understanding of learning to design environments for education that are conducive to fostering students’ self-regulatory and cooperative learning skills, transferable knowledge, and a disposition toward competent thinking and problem solving. Using the CLIA-model (Competence, Learning, Intervention, Assessment) as a framework for developing learning environments, and taking the growing knowledge base on self-regulated learning as a background, this article discusses an intervention study that aimed at the design and evaluation of a powerful learning environment for fostering self-regulated learning in university freshmen, thereby improving their learning proficiency. More specifically, the intervention in this environment focused on the trainability of four cognitive (orienting, planning, self-testing, and reflecting), and four complementary affective self-regulation skills (respectively self-judging, valuing, coping, and attributing). The effects of the learning environment were investigated using a pre-test – post-test design with a control group. The participants were 141 first-year students of business economics. The positive effects of the intervention on students’ self-regulated learning and on their academic performance is illustrated for two of the eight self-regulation skills, namely orienting (preparing one’s learning process by examining the characteristics of a learning task) and self-judging (evaluating one’s competences in view of an accurate appraisal of the efforts needed to approach and accomplish a learning task).