Self-Control, Self-Observation and Self-Monitoring

Self-control processes, such as self-instruction, imagery, attention focusing and task strategies, help learners to focus on the task and optimise their effort (Zimmerman, 2000).

Self-management processes are fundamental subprocesses of self-regulated learning. Self-management includes components of goal setting, self-monitoring, self-instruction, self-evaluation and self-reinforcement/self-punishment (Belfiore and Hornyak, 1998; Seabaugh and Schumaker, 1994). Self-instruction refers to telling oneself how to proceed during a task. According to Zimmerman (1998), skilful regulators systematically use guides or techniques, such as self-instruction, to implement their strategies of learning. There is some evidence (Schunk, 1982) that self-instruction can improve students’ learning. Self-instruction involves overtly or covertly describing how to proceed as one executes a task (Zimmerman, 2000).

Imagery or other kinds of mental picture can guide performance in learning some tasks or skills.

Attention focusing is a process to improve concentration and screen out other covert processes or external events (Zimmerman, 2000). Kuhl (1985) has studied the use of volitional methods of control, such as ignoring distractions and avoiding ruminating about past mistakes and found them to be effective.

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Task strategies assist learning and performance by reducing a task to its essential parts and re-organising the parts meaningfully. There is lot of evidence (Weinstein and Mayer, 1986; Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons, 1988) of the effectiveness of the use of various task strategies for academic learning. These strategies include learning strategies, such as note taking, test preparation and reading for comprehension.

Self-observation refers to a person’s tracking of specific aspects of his/her own performance, the conditions that surround it and the effects that it produces (Zimmerman and Paulsen, 1995). The information involved in complex performances can easily inundate naïve self -observers and lead to disorganised or cursory self-monitoring (see Zimmerman, 2000).

Academic self-monitoring refers to students’ efforts to observe themselves as they evaluate information about specific personal processes or actions that affect their learning. ‘Self-monitoring requires one to attend selectively to specific actions or cognitive processes, to distinguish them from other actions or processes and to discriminate their outcomes’ (Zimmerman, 1995, p. 14). It can be divided into formal and informal self-monitoring:

1. informal self-monitoring involves casual observation or spontaneous reflection;

2. formal self-monitoring involves systematic observations and judgements which reflect not only the present activity but also historical and contextual personal events leading to and accompanying the activity.

Self-monitoring is important for several reasons:

1. it focuses the students’ attention on a limited number of responses — when the student focuses on too many responses, no benefits are attained (Shapiro, 1984);

2. it helps the students to differentiate between effective and ineffective performance (Thoresen and Mahoney, 1974);

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3. it reveals the inadequacy of a learning strategy and prompts the student to adopt a more suitable one (Pressley and Ghatala, 1990);

4. it can enhance study-management and use of study time (Zimmerman et al., 1994);

5. it fosters reflective thinking (Bandura, 1986) and can lead to better organisation of one’s knowledge, more accurate self-judgements and more effective planning and goal setting for future efforts to learn (Zimmerman and Bandura, 1994);

6. it can help students to direct their attention, to set and adjust their goals and to guide their course of learning more effectively (Bandura, 1986; Corno, 1989).

Self-monitoring informs students about their own progress or lack of progress.

Sometimes students fail in their self-monitoring and under- or over-estimate their academic success. This might lead, for example, to misplaced optimism which leads to low results.

Most self-regulation theorists view learning as a multidimensional process involving personal (cognitive and emotional), behavioural and contextual components. For an academic skill to be mastered, learners must behaviourally apply cognitive strategies to a task within a contextually relevant setting. This usually requires repeated attempts to learn because mastery involves coordinating personal, behavioural and environmental components, each of which is separately dynamic as well as jointly interactive. For example, no single cognitive learning strategy will work equally well for all students and few, if any, strategies will work optimally on all academic tasks. The effectiveness of a strategy may even change as a skill develops, such as when a novice science student shifts from a key-word strategy for memorising basic terms in a text passage to an organisational strategy for enhancing the integration of knowledge. As a result of these diverse and changing interpersonal, contextual and intrapersonal conditions, self-regulated learners must constantly reassess the effectiveness of their strategies.

31 2.3.3. Action-Control Theory

A student can believe in his or her self-efficacy and be highly motivated but still not be able to enact the intentions to which she or he is committed if his or her self-regulatory abilities are insufficient (Kuhl, 1981; 2000). Kuhl (2000) explains that he choose the term ‘action-control’ to avoid the term ‘self-regulation’, which he did not feel to be defined in functional-design terms. According to action-control theory (Kuhl, 1984; 2000), these processes are based on various mechanisms or strategies that help to keep a difficult intention active in the memory and shield it from competing action tendencies.

Action-control maintains and protects activated intention. It can operate in a passive or an active mode (Kuhl, 1987). Passive action-control is dependent on the current dominance relations among the competing action tendencies. Kuhl suggests that this is perhaps the only action-control model used by young children. They can maintain their current goal and action plan as long as it has stronger motivational power than other competing action tendencies. According to Kuhl and Kazen-Saad (1989, p. 286) active action-control supports a subordinate action tendency.

In his laboratory tests Kuhl showed that nine-year-old children have already started to use metacognitive strategies that help them protect a behavioural intention. Kuhl (1984; 1985) has described as follows six self-regulatory strategies actively used by adults to support their motivational intentions:

1. selective attention control ‘facilitates the processing of information supporting the current intention and inhibits the processing of information supporting competing tendencies’ (Kuhl, 1986, p. 427);

2. encoding control facilitates the protective function of volition by selectively encoding those features of stimuli that are related to the current intention (see Kuhl, 1987, p. 287);

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3. emotion control facilitates the protective function of volition by inhibiting emotional states that might undermine the efficiency of volition (see Kuhl 1987, p. 287);

4. motivation control refers to a feedback relation from self-regulatory process to their own motivational basis (Kuhl, 1984) and plays an important part when the current intention is supported by a weak action tendency;

5. environmental control strategies may develop from the more basic strategies;

according to Kuhl (1986, p.428) emotional and motivational states may be controlled by manipulation of the environment (for example, people who are on a diet may tell others about their regime, hoping that the social pressure will help them maintain the intention);

6. parsimony of information processing is an aspect of volitional control related to the definition of ‘stop-rules’ for information processing (see Kuhl, 1986, p.428);

efficient action-control requires that an individual finds the optimal length for his or her decision-making process.

Volition directs and controls intellectual, emotional and behavioural energy towards academic and other goals, which are subjectively difficult to enact (Kuhl, 1986).

Self-control, the conscious form of action-control based on suppression of unin-tended processing, is only one of the two fundamentally different forms of central (i.e. volitional) control of motivational processes (Kuhl, 2000). Self-regulation is described in terms of largely implicit (unconscious) processes that integrate as many subsystems and processes as possible for the support of a chosen action (see Kuhl, 2000). The openness to self-related thoughts and feelings that is character-istic of self-regulation can be compared to an inner democracy, whereas self- control can be described in terms of inner dictatorship. In self-regulation, the self forms the basis of self-regulation, providing cognitive and emotional support for self-generated goals and actions. In self-control, ‘the self is the target of self-control