Which study skills strategies can improve students’ academic performance?

Transcript: Karen Harris, PhD

Most children with learning difficulties, learning disabilities, or other sources of learning problems need a strategy to help them begin, a strategy to keep them on-task, a strategy to monitor what they’re producing, a strategy to evaluate what they’re producing, and also they need to know how to reinforce themselves for doing well. So strategies are not just task-specific. Strategies are also for self-regulation. How do I get started? How do I set goals? How do I monitor my progress? How do I know when I’m done? So we teach in tandem self-regulation strategies with specific academic strategies. Students with learning problems and/ or disabilities need far more than simply being told these are the steps to do the task. For these students to succeed, they need self-regulation strategies that they can use in conjunction with those task strategies. There are four basic self-regulation strategies that all students need to be able to use: goal-setting, self-monitoring, effective use of self-instructions or self-talk, and self-reinforcement.

Transcript: Mary Anne Prater-Doty, PhD

The major advantage of self-regulation is that it places responsibility back on the learner for his or her academic or behavior performance. Teaching these strategies moves students away from external teacher control and toward self-regulation by requiring that the students participate actively in their own learning and take responsibility. For example, instead of a teacher monitoring a student’s academic progress, the student can be taught to self-monitor his or her academic progress. This helps them become both more independent, as well as it can be extremely motivating to students. Some of the areas of self-regulation include self-monitoring, self-reinforcement, self-assessment, self-recording, so forth. I like to talk about self-monitoring as involving both self-recording and self-assessment. So the student judges whether they engaged in a particular behavior, which would be self-assessment. They may ask themselves questions such as “Did I finish my homework?” or “Did I raise my hand when I had a question?” Then the student records—which is the self-recording on a self-monitoring sheet—the answer to that question. Of course, all of this is pre-planned and prompts are generally given to the student, whether it’s just the self-monitoring sheet itself. Sometimes there are auditory cues that are given, so a beep might go off to remind them to ask them the particular question. It depends on the behavior that’s being worked on as to what kinds of prompts are necessary. I’ve even used it with charts or posters on the wall as prompts for students. Self-monitoring doesn’t take much effort on the part of the teacher, and in the long run can really benefit them because the students are responsible, and they are engaged in the task that the teacher may typically do. Another simple example would be self-charting, where rather than the teacher gathering all of the information on students’ performance for the day and recording it on a chart, which is very time-consuming, the students are taught to self-record, and they keep their own charts of their performance. We know through research that self-monitoring can have a powerful effect on changing students’ behavior and on improving their academic skills.