Self-regulated learning as a pedagogical strategy in engineering students

Research shows that students with high and low academic performance are different in their approaches to learning, that is, they have their own systematic way of transforming information into knowledge. Good students, for example, are able to employ a range of positive strategies for learning, such as performance monitoring and the use of an active task approach (Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons, 1986). These students are also more aware of the strategies they use and why they use them (Pintrich, 2000). Self-regulated learning (SRL) is defined as an active process in which students accept autonomy and responsibility for their own learning by actively setting goals and thereby planning, monitoring, regulating, and evaluating their learning progress (Boekaerts, Pintrich, and Zeidner, 2000). Self-regulated learning is a complex concept that includes several elements. According to (Zeidner et al., 2000) self-regulated learning involves various components: cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral, which provide the individual with the ability to adjust his or her actions and goals in order to achieve the desired result in the face of variable environmental conditions. Therefore, students are considered self-regulated to the extent that they are metacognitively, motivationally and behaviourally active in their own learning processes (Zimmerman, 1989a). These processes describe how learners pose problems, apply strategies, monitor their performance and interpret the results of their efforts (Paris & Winograd, 2001). Elements considered to be part of self-regulated learning, such as cognition, metacognition, motivation, behaviour and context, are described below (McKeachie et al., 1987; Zimmerman, 2000; Pintrich, 2000)