Struggling Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves, Research Shows - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education 2/8/10 9:07 AM

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February 7, 2010
How Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves
Researchers at CUNY's Graduate Center push 'self-regulated learning'

By David Glenn
Brooklyn, N.Y.
"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
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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.

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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
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Struggling Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves, Research Shows - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education 2/8/10 9:07 AM

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

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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."
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