What Do I Know and Where Do I Go? The Effects of Guidance on Task Selection

Abstract

It is important in current society to be able to self-regulate your learning process by identifying gaps in your knowledge and skills, and by undertaking activities that can close these gaps. The studies reported in this dissertation investigated among secondary-school students what the effects are of different types of guidance on learning-task selection. Additionally, the effects of guidance on the acquisition of domain-specific skills and motivation, and the effects of conformity to guidance and the aforementioned variables were also investigated. Each experiment approximately used the same method: Secondary-school students first made a prior-knowledge test and watched training videos. Next, they selected and practiced 8 learning tasks from a selection diagram, in which 75 tasks were classified based on their difficulty and support levels. Each task consisted of the same five problem-solving steps. After practice, they made a final test.Study 1 investigated the task-selection process through the Model for Self-Regulated Learning-Task Selection (SRLTS model), which describes how the difficulty level of learning tasks can be selected through performance estimates, the support level through mental effort ratings, and the content through Judgements of Learning. The results suggested that students tend to overestimate their own performance and that their selections deviated from the tasks that the SRLTS model would have advised. This suggests that students could benefit from task-selection guidance, which was investigated in Studies 2, 3 and 4. The results from Study 2 suggested that task-selection guidance which combines specific, simple feedback with strategic, activating advice can help students to select more difficult tasks, and tasks with less support, than students who select tasks without guidance. No differences were found in acquired domain-specific skills on the final test between the students who selected with and without guidance, but conforming more often to the guidance was predictive of higher domain-specific skill acquisition. Study 3 confirmed the result regarding the selection of difficulty levels, but not support levels. It also showed no difference in acquired domain-specific skills between students that selected tasks with and without guidance, and conforming to guidance was not predictive of domain-specific skill acquisition. There seemed to be a relation between conformity and motivation, but it remained unclear which motivational variable (task value or self-efficacy) was responsible for this finding. Study 4 compared the guidance from the previous studies with computer-selected tasks using the same feedback and advice from the guidance. These results suggested that the computer-selected tasks were more difficult than the learner-selected tasks. Furthermore, tasks selected by students with guidance were more difficult than without guidance. Again, no effects were found for support levels or acquired domain-specific skills. Also, no relation was found between conformity and motivation. Taken together, the results from these studies suggest that guidance which combines simple feedback with activating strategic advice can stimulate students to select more difficult tasks than they would without guidance. The SRLTS model was further developed through these results and provides a normative method for the selection of the difficulty level of learning tasks by both teachers and students.