Self-Regulated Learning

The single biggest predictor of whether someone keeps getting better at something is not talent.

It is not intelligence. It is not even hours of practice, though that matters. The thing that seems to separate learners who keep improving from those who plateau is whether they can watch themselves learning, notice when something is not working, and adjust. This is not one skill. It is a small cluster of related skills. Setting a sensible goal, which is harder than it sounds because most people set goals that are either too ambitious or too vague. Tracking what you are actually doing as against what you meant to do. Noticing, while you are in the middle of a task, that your strategy is not producing what you hoped. Changing the strategy. Reflecting afterward on what you would do differently. None of these come naturally. All of them can be taught.

A researcher named Barry Zimmerman did the foundational work on this, and what he found is that self-regulated learning is both the most important thing a learner can develop and the thing most formal education teaches least. We test on content. We grade on outputs. We almost never teach students how to watch themselves learn, or give them any structured practice in monitoring their own thinking. The result is a system where the most important skill gets picked up accidentally, by the students whose circumstances happened to teach it, and missed entirely by the students whose circumstances did not. When you think about the last time you broke through on something difficult, was it really because you tried harder, or because you noticed something about how you were trying and changed it?

Last week we looked at the skill of watching yourself learn. This week we look at what happens to that skill once nobody is setting your goals for you anymore.