Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: STEM Science and Mathematics Education
Wei Zheng - Jackson State University
Learners not only have to manage the motivation to sustain their learning efforts, but also need to strategically regulate their cognitive activities in order to effectively acquire knowledge. Educational research has provided understanding on effective Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) and revealed that optimal learning is strongly correlated to the extent to which the learner uses SRL. However, those findings have not been well known and utilized by the STEM faculty members to facilitate learning of their students, particularly those African American students who had poor preparation in their early schooling and may mostly need the SRL skills for comprehending complex STEM subjects. This poster is intended to communicate a novel perspective for prompting STEM faculty to acquire SRL and other learning theories and prompting students to develop higher-order learning skills, and presents work-in-progress of implementation of a proposed framework in this perspective, which is the main implementation framework of a NSF-funded Target Infusion Project. The objectives of implementing the presented framework to expand faculty’s expertise in fostering students’ active learning through their participation in a teaching community and interaction with learning scientists; and to facilitate students’ SRL skill development in their STEM learning by implementing the SRL Assessment in diverse STEM courses. The SRL assessment is composed of various questions that prompt students to make plans, adopt learning strategies, reflect on their learning efforts, and make adjustments on their learning efforts. It is implemented through integration with series of course quizzes in repeated cyclic processes for fostering students’ SRL skills. Through such guided learning processes, students can have the opportunity to learn, adopt, and practice different learning strategies, and track and assess more effectively their academic learning, make adjustment for improvement, leading to enhancement of their academic performance, as well as their self-confidence and self-regulation skill. The novelty of the presented framework lies in building a broad teaching community among STEM instructors and learning scientists, whose members can provide the peer support to acquire learning theories and design, implement, evaluate, and publish their effective teaching practice in implementing SRL Assessment through intellectual exchange based on their common interest and pursuit. This novelty enables STEM instructors to adapt or develop learning strategies that are particularly suitable for a specific STEM subject in their courses, and enables students to be prompted for learning, adopting, and evaluating various regulating strategies in context of learning subjects from multiple STEM courses simultaneously. The mixed-methods with quasi-experimental design are also developed to collect and analyze data for revealing the impacts of SRL assessment on African American students’ learning in STEM fields. This poster presents the proposed framework including teaching community activity plan and SRL assessment implementation procedures, the work-in-progress of data collection on students’ learning dispositions, and future improvement and work on implementation of the presented framework.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): NSF/HRD/HBCU-UP
Faculty Advisor: None Listed,