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USING MULTIPLE LENSES TO ANALYZE A CASE OF TEACHING A CHILD
ACADEMIC SELF-REGULATION

By

Stephen Vassallo

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Educational Psychology and Educational Technology

2008

ABSTRACT

USING MULTIPLE LENSES TO ANA LYZE A CASE OF TEACHING A CHILD
ACADEMIC SELF-REGULATION

By

Stephen Vassallo

In order to understand some of the complexities of self-regulated learning (SRL), in this
dissertation I used multiple theoretical frameworks to analyze data from a case of
teaching one elementary student academic self-regulation. In this qualitative case study,
the researcher implemented an intervention with one student to help her improve her
academic performance by teaching her to use SRL. The data were then analyzed using
three complementary theoretical perspectives: psychological (Zimmerman, 2000),
sociological (Bourdieu, 1977; Lareau, 1989/200; 2003) and critical postmodern
(Foucault, 1997; Rose, 1996). The research question was: How could using multiple
perspectives illuminate some of the complexities of SRL as they related to the lived
experience of one student? Analytical insights from psychology, sociology, and critical
postmodernism suggest the following: 1) Sociological factors including habitus affected
the student’s ability to self regulate; 2) Self-efficacy and self-regulation were
simultaneously empowering and disempowering; 3) Self-regulation interventions affected
not only the student, but also implicated the parents, the family’s lifestyle, the teacher,
and the school counselor. Given these factors, the study suggests that research on self-
regulated learning take insights from sociology and critical postmodernism into account

in order to gain understanding of self-regulated learning in practice.

To Frances, Anthony and Mikayla, whose love and support make everything possible

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Lynn Fendler, the director of this dissertation, mentor and
friend; her steady conﬁdence in both the project and me made everything possible. Lynn
has stood by me throughout graduate school and has helped me in countless ways. I
would like to thank Punya Mishra whose support, thoughtfulness and friendship gave me
strength throughout this project. David Wong whose toughness always helped me to think
more productively about my work. I would like to thank Dorothea Anagnostapoulos
whose penchant for dialogue and thoughtful considerations led to wonderful
conversations.

I would like to thank my family for their patience, love and support. Frances
provided both intellectual and ﬁnancial support even when it was difficult to envision an
end to my studies. Thanks to my mom who, even though did not always understand what
I was doing and why, supported me when I needed it. And thanks to my siblings Vickie,
Debbie, Charlie, Billy and Eddie; I always felt your love and support when I was many
physical miles away.

I have had many invaluable conversations with people that have helped my work
to develop. Included are friends from my cohort: David Gallagher, Bo Yan and Natalia
Collings. The diversity of their perspectives and interests helped me to consider
phenomena from multiple angles. 1 am absolutely indebted to all those who participated
in the critical studies group. While there are many and it is difﬁcult to name them all,
there are those who have been particularly important to me: Steven Tuckey, Cleo

Cherryholmes, Lynn Fendler, Ira Socol, Brett Merritt, Adam Greteman, Jeannie and John

iv

Lockhardt.

There were also many people who have been important for my intellectual
development: Kelly Mix, Shi-pei Chang, TE ISO instructors, TB 250 instructors, Curtis
Lewis, Ruth Riddle, Robin Harris and Megan Fedor.

I am indebted to Karen, the participant in my dissertation; we have developed into
great friends and I wish the best for her. I would like to thank the teacher and students of

Karen’s class for welcoming me into their classroom.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................... ix
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1
Problem Statement .............................................................................. 2
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................ 6
SRL and Individual Human Agency ......................................................... 7
Constructivist Perceptions of Agency .............................................. 8
Socioulturalist Perceptions of Agency ............................................ 15
Limitations of Agentic Perspectives .............................................. 19
The Successful Student/T he Self-regulated Learner .................................... .20
Habit and Control ................................................................... .22
Primary and Secondary Discourses ................................................ 24
Goals ................................................................................... .27
Ethics of SRL ................................................................................. 34
Individual and Social Betterment ................................................... 34
Empowering and Disempowering .36
Chapter Conclusion... .. ... 40
CHAPTER THREE
METHODS ........................................................................................... 4 2
Case-Study Design ......................................................................... 4 3
Why One Student .................................................................. 4 3
Length of Time .................................................................... 44
Research Sites ..................................................................... 46
Introduction to Karen ...................................................................... 49
Choosing a Struggling Student ................................................. .50
Choosing an Upper-Elementary Student ...................................... .52
Choosing a Student with CAPD ................................................ 54
Intervention ................................................................................. 57
Baseline Data ..................................................................... .58
Self-efﬁcacy ....................................................................... 59
Analytical Frameworks .................................................................... 64
Social Cognitive Perspective .................................................... 64
Critical Postmodernism ........................................................... 6 7
Habitus and Cultural Capital ..................................................... 7 0
Chapter Conclusion ........................................................................ 73
CHAPTER FOUR
ANALYSIS FROM A SOCIAL COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE ............................. 74
Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective .................................... 75

vi

Understanding Self-efﬁcacy and Self-Regulation ..................................... 7 8

Self-efﬁcacy and Performance Outcomes .............................................. 7 9
Help Seeking: Learned Helplessness and Self—regulation ............................ 85
Self—efﬁcacy and Goal Setting ............................................................ 90
Metacognitive Awareness ................................................................. 96
Self-efﬁcacy and SRL .................................................................... 100
Self-efﬁcacy Development: Issues and Challenges .................................. 100
The Intervention and Obstacles to Self-efﬁcacy ............................. 101
Teaching and Obstacles to Self—efﬁcacy ...................................... 103
Chapter Conclusion .......... - ............................................................. 107
CHAPTER FIVE
INTRODUCTION: SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS .......................................... 109
Habitus and Child Rearing Practices ................................................... 111
Parents, Schools and SRL ................................................................ 113
Separation between Home and School ................................................ 114
Expectations for Concerted Cultivation ...................................... 116
Cultivation of Comprehension Skills ......................................... 118
Class Implications of Concerted Cultivation of Reading .................. 120
Reading Comprehension and SRL ............................................. 123
Parental Intervention in Schools ........................................................ 127
Intervention in Assignments ................................................... 129
Parental Intervention and Karen’s Disability ................................ 136
Teacher’s Expectations for Concerted Cultivation .......................... 138
What this Means for SRL ...................................................... 141
Deferring Education ..................................................................... 144
Deferring Education to Professionals ......................................... 145
Deferring Education to Karen .................................................. 147
Cultural Capital and Learning Resources ............................................. 149
Access to Computer Technology .............................................. 150
Value of Computer Technology ................................................ 152
Chapter Conclusion ....................................................................... 155
CHAPTER SIX .
INTRODUCTION: A CRITICAL POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE ..................... 158
Empowerment and SRL....._. ............................................................ 158
Making Responsible Learners ........................................................... 162
Intemalization of Learning Strategies ......................................... 163
Homogenization of Rules of Engagement .................................... 170
SRL and the Moral Imperative ................................................ 172
Responsible Learners ..................................................................... 176
Calculation and Documentation: An Exercise in Truth .............................. 177
The Truth Will Set Karen Free ................................................ 180
Truth Telling and Coercion ..................................................... 183
SRL as Truth Therapy ........................................................... 188
Chapter Conclusion ....................................................................... 189

vii

CHAPTER SEVEN

CONLCUSION ..................................................................................... 191
Social Cognitive ........................................................................... 191
Intervention ....................................................................... I92

Teacher’s Pedagogy ............................................................. 193

Concerted Cultivation ........................................................... 194

Sociological ................................................................................ 194
Critical Postmodern ...................................................................... 196

Future Research ........................................................................... 199
APPENDICES .................................................................................... .201
Motivated Strategies Learning Questionairre ........................................ .202
Teacher Interview Protocol ............................................................. .207

Child Interview Protocol ................................................................ .210
REFERNECES .................................................................................... 211

viii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1

School Observation Schedule ............................................................... 47
Table 2

Daily

Schedule ........................................................................................ 48
Table 3

Research Sites ................................................................................. 49
Table 4

Report Cards ................................................................................... 52
Table 5

Interviews ....................................................................................... 59

ix

Chapter 1
Introduction

In this research study, I worked with a fifth grade student named Karen who was
struggling in school since the second grade. The purpose of working with Karen was to
support her academic success by helping her regulate learning. I implemented an
intervention designed to foster self-regulated learning (SRL). The intervention was
mainly implemented at home with Karen while helping her with her homework. The
intervention lasted ﬁve months. I worked with Karen after school to help her learn to
regulate learning while completing her homework. What this meant was that I worked
with Karen to help her:

1) Acquire learning strategies

2) Evaluate tasks and implement strategies to engage with those tasks

3) Understand how her beliefs impacted her behavior so she could gain control

over her behavior

4) Evaluate and document features of her thinking and behavior and their

relationship to the environment
Zimmerman (1998) deﬁned SRL as being metacognitively, motivationally and
behaviorally active in one’s learning.

Karen was identiﬁed as academically struggling since the second grade. While in
the ﬁfth grade the areas with which Karen struggled most were math, social studies and
certain components of language arts. Karen struggled with tasks that involved reading
and writing. During the second grade, Karen was diagnosed with a central auditory

processing disability (CAPD). Researchers argued that the cognitive limitations

associated with this disability could be overcome by regulating oneself (citations). In
addition, Karen’s special education teacher, general education and parents stated that
Karen could beneﬁt from a SRL intervention.

Karen came from a working class family background. While conducting the
research study, Karen lived with her biological father, stepmother and her two sisters, 16-
years-old and 2-years-old. Karen’s father described himself as having Mexican heritage.
Karen’s stepmother described herself as Caucasian. Karen’s biological mother was also
described as Caucasian. Karen identiﬁed as both but identiﬁed more strongly with being,
what she called, “white.” Karen liked to play sports, especially softball and basketball,
which she played in organized leagues. During recess and lunch, at times students went
outside, Karen mostly played basketball with only other boys.

In this research study, I used different perspectives to explore some complexities

with teaching academic self-regulation.

Statement of Problem

In the National Research Council’s (2000) book that describes the ways people
learn, the argument was made that the goal of education has shifted from “knowing” and
“repeating” content to helping students develop the intellectual tools and learning
strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows them to think productively about
school subjects (p. 5). This educational shift reﬂects and has been reflected by what has
been described as a rapidly growing body of research and theory of self-regulated
learning (SRL) (Winne, 2005).

SRL is described as proactive engagement in one’s learning whereby self-initiated

strategies are used to control and monitor behavior, cognition, and environment in order
to achieve one’s learning goals (Zimmerman, 1989). In the SRL literature, researchers
have argued that teaching students to be self-regulated learners has become increasingly
necessary because of diverse student populations (Masui & De Corte, 2005; Perry, 2004),
nonlinearity of knowledge sources (Whipp & Chiarelli, 2004), and abundant knowledge
and knowledge sources (National Research Council, 2000). Researchers in educational
psychology contend that SRL is important for students’ academic achievement, lifelong
learning, and ability to solve problems outside of school (Lapan, Kardash, & Turner,
2002; Zimmerman, 2002). Researchers have suggested that learning to academically
self-regulate can ameliorate social, economic and educational inequalities (Lapan et al.,
2002; Meyer & Turner, 2002; SO. Paris & Winograd, 2003; Perry, VandeKamp,
Mercer, & Nordby, 2002; Zimmerman, 1998, 2002).

There has been a steady increase of research and theory on student SRL over the
last decade (Winne, 2005; Martin, a2004). In this ﬂurry of scholarship, SRL has been
treated as a form of empowerment whereby students enact a better sense of control over
their learning (Bembenutty & Chen, 2005; Como, 1989; Harris, Graham, & Mason,
2003; Lapan et al., 2002; Mahoney & Thoresen, 1974; Pintrich, 2000). Though
researchers do not reduce all achievement to SRL, it carries substantial weight as an
explanatory framework for differences in achievement (Schunk, 2005). Some of the
seductiveness and allure of SRL surely comes from its potential for educators to move
, beyond static explanations of achievement to dynamic explanations of achievement that
could be facilitated and enhanced through individual SRL training. It is generally

accepted that SRL helps to overcome limitations brought about by natural endowment,

native tendencies and limitations in cognitive processing. The assumption is that
academic success could be achieved by harnessing the personal power to monitor, control
and transform, if necessary, such conditions as emotions, cognition, behavior and the
environment.

With the increase in research and theory on SRL, I was concerned that SRL has
not been adequately, if at all, considered ﬁom different perspectives. There are multiple
constructs, such as, but not limited to, control, freedom, empowerment and agency that
are intimately entangled, implicitly and explicitly, in SRL. These notions are complex
and mean different things from different perspectives. I would like to investigate the
complexities of SRL by considering it from multiple perspectives. If multiple
perspectives are ignored, the usefulness of SRL as a mechanism for supporting academic
achievement could be limited. Paramount to any view of SRL and often laying the
foundation of conceptions of the self-regulated learner, these notions are worth analyzing
in considerable depth from multiple points of view. If the trend continues towards
teaching and valuing SRL, it is important to understand the multiple dimensions of SRL,
so not to see it too narrowly.

From my reading of the ﬁeld, this exploration into these dimensions has begun in
educational psychology literature and elsewhere. Contemporary researchers and theorists
within educational psychology have begun to critically examine self-regulated learning
(Martin, 2004a, 2004b, 2006; Martin & McLellan, 2006; Wong, 2007). I see these
examinations as not suggesting that SRL be abandoned. Rather, these critical treatments
of SRL help to highlight the importance of clarifying and adding nuance to research and

theory on SRL. These critical examinations have also pushed me to consider the aims

and goal of SRL and to evaluate the ethical and practical implications of those goals.

The critical examinations that have already been conducted were theoretical and
philosophical. While these examinations have enormous value for considering the
complexity of SRL, my research study was intended to contribute to this budding critical
dialogue by adding both an empirical dimension and analysis from multiple perspectives,
ones not been typically used to study SRL. The purpose for using these rather
unconventional perspectives was to see what SRL look liked from different
epistemological standpoints. The perspectives that I used were as follows: sociological,
psychological and critical postmodern. The variation and juxtaposition of these
perspectives have the potential to cast different lights on the notion of SRL and illuminate
interesting considerations that have received little to no attention. It is important to
broaden our conception of SRL by examining some its foundations so that teachers and
educational psychologists have elaborate repertoires for understanding, evaluating,

researching, and facilitating SRL.

Chapter 2
Literature Review
In this literature review I highlight some of the complexities that I found in the
self-regulated learning (SRL) literature. The central theme in the ﬁrst portion of this
literature review is the notion of individual human agency, which is'a notion that
implicitly and explicitly lies at the foundation of SRL (Martin, 2004b). The question
driving this segment of the literature review is as follows: Is SRL an expression of
individual human agency? I ﬁnd this question important because of ethical and
conceptual reasons. When I discuss conceptions of agency, these reasons will be
explained and explored further. In my discussion of agency and SRL, I note that
responses to this question vary when considered from different epistemological
standpoints. I will consider the relationship between agency and SRL mainly from
constructivist and sociocultural perspectives.

. Another complexity of SRL is an ethical one. Researchers have argued that
fostering SRL is an important goal for teachers to achieve (Perry, VandeKamp, Mercer,
Nordby, 2004; Pressley & Ghatala, 1990; Zimmerman, 1998). The proliferation of
models to teach SRL attests to the importance given to this educational aim. With all the
research conducted on SRL, there has been little exploration of the ethical implication of
teaching SRL. That is, there has been little research and theory on SRL that thoroughly
examines issues related to social and individual betterment, empowerment and
disempowerrnent and freedom and domination. In much of the literature, it is assumed
that SRL is empowering, good and right. I will consider the ethical implications of SRL

by examining the way that its functions have been conceptualized. There will be some of

this ethical exploration in the ﬁrst section of the paper, but will be concentrated mainly in

the later section.

SRL and Individual Human Agency

Agency endures a taken-for-granted status in research on and theory of SRL.
Though the notion of agency is ambiguous, politically charged, debated and contested, it
often remains an implicit assumption undergirding constructions of the self-regulated
learner. Martin (2004b) stated, “The self as agent is pervasively implicit in most writings
on the topic of self-regulated learning, as it is in the larger psychological literature on
self-regulation” (p. 135). Oﬁen conceptualized as opposite to structural determinism,
agency is a notion that identiﬁes intention, purpose, choice, selfhood and freedom as the
cause and effect of human functioning.

Martin (2004b) deﬁned agency as “the capability of human beings to make
choices and to act on those choices in ways that make a difference in their lives” (p.135).
This deﬁnition is not unlike Bandura’s (2001). He stated that to be an agent “is to
intentionally make things happen by one’s own actions (p. 2). For Bandura, forethought,
intentionality, self-reaction and self-reﬂection are core features of agency.

Agency seems directly tied to control. Who or what controls what individuals do?
Is it individuals’ choices, perceptions, will, thinking or intention—things potentially
controlled by individuals—that determine what they do? Is it intemal or external
structures, thought of as uncontrollable, that determine what individuals do? Are
individuals born as agents or must individuals learn to be agents? These questions speak

superﬁcially, at best, to only a few of the complexities of agency. The reason for starting

with agency and some of its conceptual complexities was because of the importance
agency plays in research and theory of SRL (Martin, 2004b). In the next section, in

relation to SRL I explore what agency looks like from constructivist and sociocultural

perspectives.

Constructivist Perspectives of Agency

According to Martin (2004b), a constructivist perspective of agency involves the
treatment of learners as active participants in the construction, organization and
reorganization of knowledge structures that are internal to the learner. Also from his
interpretation, Martin viewed a constructivist treatment of agency as developmental. He
stated, “for the constructivist, learner activity is an instrumental means of experimenting
with an independent reality so that a pre-existent ‘mind’ with agentic capability can
achieve appropriate kinds of intellectual and moral development” (Martin, 20004, p.
136). From Martin’s understanding of agency in relation to constructivism, individuals
are born with agentic capabilities but must achieve that agency with certain kinds of
knowledge.

Despite Bandura’s denunciation of dualisrns, Martin (2004b) charges that
contemporary formulations of SRL using the social cognitive theory rely on constructions
of the learner that are informed by constructivism, which, as Martin noted, relies on a
mind/world split. Martin’s interpretation of social cognitive treatment of SRL makes
sense. Similar to many models of SRL, researchers who draw from social cognitive
theory often emphasize the harnessing of psychological power to develop the skill and

will to control one’s self and one’s world.

Given the pitfalls associated with behaviorist views of learning (Greeno, Collins, ,
& Resnick, 1996), such an emphasis on agentic capabilities in social cognitive theory and
research on SRL research seems justiﬁable. For behaviorists, changes in behavior occur
as a direct result of an environmental change. Skinner (1971), for example, believed that
behavioral technologies could be developed that could, with the consideration of past
reinforcements histories and genetic endowment, systematically and predictably lead to
the expression of certain behaviors. Such external determination of behavior would
seemingly dissolve constructs such as agency, and some of its accompanying notions
such as autonomy, independence, and individual responsibility, which are all notions that
characterize contemporary studies involving the self and SRL.

Skinner (1971) characterized the shift away from behaviorism as being compelled
by the notion of a “miraculous” and “autonomous” human who has the power to choose
and control environmental effects on thoughts and behaviors (p.23). Obviously Skinner’s
use of “miraculous” has a patronizing tone. For him, thoughts are a byproduct of an
environmental association and less the mechanism that determines human behavior. In a
similar line of thinking, Wegner and Wheatley (1999) argued that individuals often
wrongly attribute the determination of behavior to thoughts because of the contiguity
between a behavior and a thought.

Few researchers and theorists would probably dispute the fact the environment is
a factor for understanding human thought and behavior. A key feature of the social
cognitive view of SRL, and most treatments of SRL in general, is that thoughts can be
used to understand and control the affects of the environment. Also ﬁom this

perspective, one’s thoughts are believed to shape environmental potentialities. So for the

social cognitive perspective, the environment was not removed as variable inﬂuencing
thought and behavior but was something that could be controlled and shaped by
harnessing and developing certain psychological capacities.

Mahony and Thoresen (1974), who were ﬁom Pennsylvania State University and
Stanford University, respectively, were social cognitive oriented researchers writing
about issues pertaining to self- regulation. They stated:

It has been our contention that the truly ‘free’ individual is one who is in intimate

contact with himself and his environment. He knows ‘where he’s at’ in terms of

the factors inﬂuencing both his actions and his surroundings. . ..He is free to exert
countercontrol on his environment. . .and ﬂee to draw upon a repertoire of

effective behaviors. (p. 72)

In this quotation, Mahoney and Thoresen are alluding to the ethical implications of
environmental, behavioral and self-awareness. I will come back to this in the later
section. For now, I just want to highlight the ways they view self-regulation. The
authors do not use the notion of self-regulation, but rather use the notion of self-control,
which was the 1970’s zeitgeist (Martin, 2004a), to discuss forms of engagement that
resemble contemporary formulations of SRL. An important feature of self-control,
according to Mahoney and Thoresen, was control over the environment through the
understanding of the relationship between the behavior and the environment. The authors
believed that all individuals have the capacity to achieve self-control by learning
techniques of observation and calculation of the self, behavior and environment. These
forms of calculation and documentation were purported to enable individuals to know the

ways the environment effected behavior. This knowledge was then supposed to be the

10

means by which to go about changing the environment to elicit targeted, desired
behaviors. From this position, certain kinds of cognitive awareness and technical skills
could help individuals overcome environmental deterrninisnm, and essentially realize and
exercise one’s agentic capabilities.

Zimmerman (1989) drew from the Mahoney and Thoresen’s (1974) work to
inform early formulations of SRL. An element that Zimmerman (1989) emphasized,
which was informed by Bandura (2001), was the role that self-perceptions played in
one’s motivation, volition and skill at controlling the environment, behaviors and
emotions. In particular, Zimmerman (1989) identiﬁed self-efﬁcacy as the key
psychological mechanism of SRL. Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1996) deﬁned self-
eﬁ'icacy as “the degree to which a person feels capable of successfully performing a
certain task, such as solving a type of science problem” (p. 140). In more contemporary
formulations of SRL, Zimmerman (2000) connected self-efﬁcacy to individual human
agency. He (2000) stated.

Our regulatory skill or lack thereof is the source of our perception of personal

agency [emphasis added] that lies at the core of our sense of self. . ..it [SRL]

entails not only behavioral skill in self-managing environmental contingencies,
but also the knowledge and the sense of personal agency to enact this skill in

relevant contexts (Zimmerman, 2000, pp. 13-14). I
In this formulation, “personal agency” is treated as a key factor in SRL. From my
understanding, “personal agency” used this way seems to comprise a number of personal
variables, one of them, perhaps the most important, is self-efﬁcacy. From Zirnmerman’s

(2000) brand of the social cognitive perspective, SRL is connected to perceptions of

11

agency, which involves self-perceptions, such as self-efﬁcacy.

The use of the phrase “perceptions of personal agency” is worth noting because it
reveals Zimmerman’s (2000) underlying epistemological commitments. Perception
connotes an individual construction of something that may or may not be objectively
veriﬁed or justiﬁed. By using the word “perception,” I am led to believe that
Zimmerman is making a distinction between what is subjective and objective. As a result
of this distinction, it would seem that the main obstacle to successful SRL involved one’s
subjective misreading of possibilities and potentialities. Or instead, it could suggest that
individuals’ perceptions are responsible for shaping potentialities. Regardless if there are
objective possibilities or if possibilities are constructed by an individual, it is clear that
Zimmerman (2000) viewed individuals as having the capacity to control the outcomes of
their lives by shaping environmental possibilities and potentialities. It seems to follow
from this logic that the realization that the ﬁeld of possibilities is wide open and that the
right perception will enable individuals to control the outcomes of their lives.

Before I continue, I would like to offer a recapitulation of what I have thus far
presented. I began with a deﬁnition of agency, making the claim that many SRL
researchers and theorists assume agentic capabilities in learners. I wanted to show that
these researchers and theorists, especially those writing within the social cognitive
tradition, have connected agency to SRL. The argument postulated by Zimmerman
(2000) is that realizing ones’ personal power, that is having the right perceptions of
oneself and the world, could lead to the achievement of personal learning goals by
controlling the environment, behavior and one’s psychology. I have suggested that this

postulation is similar to suggesting that all individuals have agentic capabilities and can

12

regulate learning, only some have the right perceptions and are therefore more likely to
take control of their lives.

The positioning of an agentic self-regulated learner informs many
conceptualizations of SRL. Many proliﬁc SRL researchers explicitly start with the
premise that all individuals are self-regulated learners. The corollary to this premise is
that differences in academic performance are explained by the quality and quantity of
SRL strategies (Schunk, 2005; Winne, 2005; Zimmerman, 1998, 2000). The discourse
seems to have shifted to difference rather than exclusion. For example, in Zirnmerman’s
contemporary formulations of SRL, he used the notions of ineffective (2000),
dysfunctional (2000) and naive and expert (1998) self-regulated learners. He stated:

It has been argued that every person attempts to self-regulate his or her

functioning in some way to gain goals in life and that it is inaccurate to speak

about un-self-regulated person or even the absence of self-regulation. From this
perspective, what distinguishes effective from ineffective forms of self-regulation
is instead the quality and quantity of one’s self-regulatory processes.”

(Zimmerman, 2000, p. 15).

From this way of thinking about SRL, if everyone attempts to self-regulate and has the
capacity to do so, the feature that distinguishes learners is the quality and quantity of
SRL.

Winne (2005) also dissolved this distinction between those who self-regulate and
those who did not by informing his understanding of a learner using constructivist
epistemology (Greeno et al., 1996; Martin, 2004b):

Learners are agents. Learners construct knowledge. Whether scaffolding is

13

available or not, these paradigmatic stances necessitate that learners can and do

self-regulate learning. Empirically, it is impossible to prove every learner is

constantly engaged in SRL because data to validate this claim cannot be collected

for each learner at every instant whenever they learn. (Winne, 2005, p. 559)
Though he acknowledged the difﬁculties with empirically proving the claim all
individuals are self-regulated learners, the foundation that learners are agents and that
they construct representations of the world brings him to make a universalizing statement
about SRL, a statement that reﬂects epistemologically narrow presuppositions.

The juxtaposition of the notions “constructing knowledge” and “agent” reveals an
association worth noting. While Winne (2005) does not say that learners are agents
because they construct knowledge, the juxtaposition of these statements might certainly
lead one to make this causal attribution. If constructing knowledge qualiﬁed individuals
as agents and also qualiﬁed individuals as self-regulated, then it would seem that it might
be empirically impossible to prove everybody is not self-regulated or an “agent.” If
knowledge is always being constructed, in the heads of individuals I assume is what he
meant, and that knowledge construction necessitates that individuals “can and “do”
regulate learning, then individuals are not self-regulating when they are not constructing
knowledge. From a constructivist perspective, when do individuals not construct
knowledge? Is knowledge construction always controlled and controllable by
individuals?

To summarize, agency is a notion that rests at the foundation of conceptions of
SRL. Agency could be considered the personal power to make choices that affect one’s

life outcomes. For SRL theorists and researchers, agency is the perceptions of personal

14

power to achieve learning goals by controlling thoughts, behaviors and environment. I
have argued that widely cited and inﬂuential SRL researchers and theorists assume
agentic capabilities, which is similar to the assumption that all learners are self-regulated.
SRL and agency are conceptual siblings, if not conceptual conﬂations, in much of the
literature on SRL. From the social cognitive perspective, having certain perceptions of
self—efficacy, fears and doubts are key to SRL. Personal power is hindered by faulty

perceptions of it and so dysfunctional SRL is changed at the level of the psychological.

Socioculturalist Perspectives of Agency

The agency attributed to all learners, which has been used to justify the claim that
all learners are self-regulated learners, has not gone uncontested. Martin (2004a; 2004b;
2006), who theorized ﬁom a socioculturalist position, raised critical questions about the
status of the agent in self-regulated learning, suggesting that the conception of agency in
SRL research is grounded in Enlightenment assumptions of a rational individual with an
interior core that is separable from social cultural constitution. Thus, to begin with the
assumption of an a priori agent is epistemologically narrow.

Additionally, relying on a priori agentic capabilities fails to account for the way
context shape ideas of choice, control and selfhood. In an attempt to address the the
contextmight shape choice, control and selfhood, researchers and theorists have relied on
notions such as other-regulation (Azevedo, Winters, & Moos, 2004), co-regulation
(McCaslin & Hickey, 2001) and shared-regulation (V ermunt & Verloop, 1999) to
differentiate kinds of regulation in the classroom. While this research could work to

compartrnentalize SRL and still preserve the constructivist conceptions of the learner, it

15

is notable because it also works to identify context as essential for understanding SRL.
The socioculturalists paradigm of SRL involves the examination of the emergence and
deployment of student SRL in a context (Martin, 2006; Packer & Goicoechea, 2000;
Patrick & Middleton, 2002; Perry, 2002; Perry et al., 2002).

Packer & Goicoechea (2000) stated that sociocultural theories emphasize
“characteristics of social participation, relationships (such as between novice and expert,
newcomer and old-timer), the setting of activity, and historical change” (p. 227). Martin
(2006) noted that all, what he called, social cultural perspectives share a common
approach to human learning that eschews assumptions about individuals as having
natural, universal and interior cognitive structures that are responsible for representing
the world. Researchers who draw from sociocultural theories reject the brain-in-a-vat
conception of human learning. This metaphor is used to describe Cartesian rationality
whereby individuals are viewed as accessing truth and reality through and by reason and
that this ability to reason is a priori.

Emerging from this epistemological distinction were two different
conceptualizations of SRL: SRL as an aptitude and SRL as an event. Perry (2002)
deﬁned aptitude as “relatively enduring characteristics of an individual that can be
aggregated over or abstracted from behavior across multiple even ” (p2). Though
outwardly rejected (Schunk & Zimmerman, 1997), the social cognitive view of SRL has
been interpreted as treating SRL as a relatively enduring trait that involves the ability to
adapt knowledge and skill across multiple events (Perry, 2002). Perry (2002) argued that
treating SRL as an event meant considering the context in which SRL is happening as the

unit of analysis rather than the individual. Patrick and Middleton (2002) noted,

16

' “Research ﬁom an event perspective focuses on individuals’ engagement in speciﬁc
activities, rather than averaged across multiple occasions” (p. 28). Although these
researchers did not deﬁne temporal or spatial parameters around the notion of event or
activity, it seems the emphasis on the notion of event is a move away ﬁ'om the proclivity
to characterize individuals as self-regulated learners, as if it were some internal
characteristic or a corollary to a priori agentic capabilities. Similarly in the motivation
literature, some researchers moved away from viewing students as either motivated and
unmotivated; rather, the emphasis shifted to account for and understand the external
conditions that affected motivation (Good & Brophy, 2008; Linnenbrink & Pintrich,
2006).

Depending on the brand of sociocultural theorizing, agency from a sociocultural
perspective could be understood differently. For one, the acquisition of language could
be viewed as the means of developing mastery over oneself and one’s environment
(Rorhkemper). From this perspective, it might be said that individuals could be
controlled by biological forces until the necessary qualitative changes occurred in the
development of signs and tools that permitted self-mastery (V ygotsky, 1978). This
reading of Vygotsky might seem epistemologically inaccurate. Martin (2006) suggested
that researchers who draw from Vygoskian sociocultural theory might neglect to consider
that individuals are constituted within particular historical contexts and are not
developing stable, disconnected and rational psychological processes independent of any
context. According to Martin (20006), those who neglect to recognize this feature of

Vygotskian sociocultural theory are theorizing closing to a constructivist epistemology.

In the Handmk of Educational Psychology, Martin (2006) proposed an

17

expansion of the perspectives that constituted sociocultural theorizing. In this chapter, he
categorized the poststructural work of Nikolas Rose and Michele Foucault as a particular
brand of sociocultural theorizing. From my understanding of Rose and Foucault’s work,
they have not relied on the notion of agency in their work, nor have pursued explanations
for their objects of study using the notion of agency. When invoked, the notion of agency
gets tangled in dualisms between mind and world, willful and powerless, empowered and
disempowered, liberation and subordination, and free and dominated. In Rose and
Foucault’s work, these dualisms break down, and from this perspective, it does not make
sense to ask the question: is SRL an expression of agency? In chapter six, in which I
analyze data using the critical postmodern work of Rose and Foucault, I try to make it
clear why invoking agency from a critical postmodern perspective is problematic.

To summarize the section on sociocultural theory and agency, researchers and
theorists who draw from sociocultural theory have tried to conceptually and
epistemologically differentiate SRL ﬁom constructivist epistemology. In an effort to
distance themselves from constructivists, the a priori agent has been removed. Still, some
researchers and theorists who draw from sociocultural theory treat agency as a
cumulative development, whereby the development of cognitive tools provide individuals
with the capacity to master the self and the environment. So, self-regulation is something
to be achieved through interaction in the world and is not pre-ontological. Not all brands
of sociocultural theory treat agency and self-regulation in the same way. I SRL has yet to
be examined from a critical postmodern perspective, which Martin (2006) categorized as

a brand of sociocultural theorizing.

18

Limitations of Agentic Perspectives

Although sociocultural research on SRL has addressed criticisms of constructivist
emphasis on a priori agentic capabilities, much of the existing sociocultural research on
SRL suffers for a number of reasons. First, the validation and metaphysical certainty
assigned to psychological constructs, such as self-efﬁcacy and metacognition, work to
locate this research towards more constructivist conceptions of SRL. Second,
emphasizing the way environmental conditions affect student SRL, researchers do not go
far enough in trying to dissolve the individual/world dualism. Martin (2006) stated, “All
social cultural perspectives understand persons as actually constituted by sociocultural
practices, not just inﬂuenced or affected by them” (Martin, 2006, p. 596). From my
reading of the ﬁeld, sociocultural treatment of SRL treats context as inﬂuencing or
affecting SRL enactment.

Third, to contend that SRL depends on environmental conditions identiﬁes those
conditions as the causes of thought and behavior. Thus, the question is raised whether or
not student engagement that depends on external conditions could be described as SRL.
To some extent, this limitation has been circmnvented through the semantic shift to co-
regulation. Finally, sociocultural theorists are starting with the premise that all students
are inherently capable self-regulated learning, only that certain environmental conditions
either curtail or support acts of student SRL. To presume that SRL depends on context
seems tantamount to a presumption that individuals have a disposition to act certain ways
under proper external conditions. Taken together, constructivist and sociocultural
perspectives of SRL presume that individuals are self-regulated learners or have the

disposition to regulate learning, respectively.

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The Successful Student/The Self-regulated Learner

In the previous section, I noted that for the social cognitive view of SRL one’s
perception of agency was a key feature. I began to consider what counts as SRL by
considering ideas of agency embedded in the theories of SRL. Because of the taken-for-
granted assumption of the acting agent, it seemed that any thought or behavior could
count as self—regulated. If that were the case, then, as Zimmerman (2000) noted, what
differentiates individuals is the quality and quantity of their SRL strategy use. From
Zimmerman’s (2000) account, one of the factors affecting the quality and quantity of
SRL strategy use is one’s perception of agency, which includes self-efﬁcacy.

What is quality SRL? What is the quantity of SRL needed to be academically
successful? How can teachers tell the quality and quantity of SRL? ls academic success
a gauge for high quality and quantity SRL? The question that drives this section is as
follows: can one infer the existence of the high quality and quantity SRL based on
performance outcomes, such as standardized test scores, grades and teacher reports?
Asked another way: are successful students self-regulated learners?

The association between successful student and self-regulated learner has been a
common association (van Den Hurk, 2006; Whipp & Chiarelli, 2004; Zimmerman &
Martinez-Pans, 1986). In the manual for developing self-regulated learners, Zimmerman,
Bonner and Kovach (1996) referred to the success of, at once, disenfranchised and
impoverished individuals who overcame political, economic and social obstacles by
regulating themselves. Other historical ﬁgures, such Benjamin Franklin, George

Washington Carver and Indonesian immigrants, were also named for their

20

accomplishments, which were associated with self-regulation (Zimmerman, 1998).
Zimmerman (1998) stated that these individuals and group of individuals went beyond
their “humble origins” and “limited access to high-quality education” by educating and
disciplining themselves, and by recognizing that “learning is a proactive activity
requiring self-initiated motivational and behavioral processes as well as metacognitive
ones” (Zimmerman, 1998, pg.1).

The conﬂation of the successful student with the self-regulated learner manifests
in a couple of different ways. For one, making reference to historical ﬁgures and
interpreting their behavior in terms of SRL assumes one knows what those individuals
experienced. When considering historical, or even contemporary ﬁgures, it seems
difﬁcult to unequivocally attribute their accomplishments to self-regulation. How did
Zimmerman know what these individuals experienced? It seems success was used to
infer what they experienced.

Another way this conﬂation manifests is through research studies whereby
successful students were studied. In a study conducted by Zimmerman and Pons (1986),
successful students were interviewed in order to discern what they do to be successful.
For this particular research study, success was based on standardized test scores, teacher
reports and grades. From this research study, the authors developed a list of 13 strategies
for SRL. In this early formulation of SRL, the deﬁnition of successful and self-regulated
was recursive. That is, successful student meant self-regulated and self-regulated meant
successful.

The association between successful students and self-regulated learners warrants

some caution. First, success in school might be due to habits, which could be understood

21

as mindless processes. Second, which is related to the ﬁrst, success in school could have
had to do with compatible primary and secondary discourses (Gee, 1992). Third, self-
regulation does not always align with institutional expectations and mandates and
therefore, highly skilled self-regulation might not be construed as self-regulation because
it does not lead to the achievement of some norm. Fourth, if success is confounded with
self-regulated, then fostering success could involve homogenizing the rules of academic

engagement. I will address each point in succession.

Habit and Mental Control

SRL is often associated with the exercise of control, a conceptual commitment I
connected to agency. For SRL, control over thoughts, behaviors and the environment are
essential. Vohs & Baumeister (2004) stated: “. .. various well—developed theses
concerning the broad idea of self-regulation as “the many processes by which the human
psyche exercises control over its functions, states, and inner processes” (p. l). I interpret
the social cognitive perspective as construing SRL this way. From this perspective
pSychological variables are treated as the intermediary between behavior and the
environment. 80, it seems that psychological, or mental, control is necessary for and part
of SRL.

Wegner & Erber (1993) wrote that during a time of mental control a person is of
two minds: there is one part of the mind that “harbors certain thoughts, emotions, or
desires that another part of the mind wishes to dispel, modify or replace” (p. 36). This
treatment of mental control is not enu'rely different from views of mental control that rely

on an executive function, which is a psychological mechanism in charge of monitoring

22

and altering other psychological, behavioral and environment mechanisms to ensure the
achievement of one’s personal goals. With these fragmented treatments of consciousness
complicates the attribution of mental control to successful student/self—regulated learners.

Based on the deﬁnition of mental control noted above, if self-regulated learners
were to experience mental control, they would have these two minds, a sort of internal
fragmentation whereby each mental part struggled to ensure the moral and ethical
function of the entire system. Being of two minds of course connotes the idea that one of
the minds has access to more favorable thoughts, emotions and desires. Based on the
logic above, if mental control is a necessary condition of SRL and successful students are
self-regulated, then it follows that successful students have this fragmented consciousness
in which the academic, moral and social part executes its authority over the other parts to
ensure successful school functioning.

What about habit? Do successful students rely on habit for academic
engagement? If so, could habit be construed as a form of mental control? According to
Wegner and Eber’s (1993) deﬁnition, habit would not count as mental control. It seems,
however, relying on habit does not necessary preclude others from classifying individuals
as engaging in self-regulation. For example, Bargh and Chartland (1999) identiﬁed three
important skills of a self-regulated learner: monitoring and interpreting one’s behavior,
goal setting, and evaluation. They sated that as an adaptive function these skills become
automatic, nonconscious and “perform the lion’s share of the self-regulatory burden” (pg.
462). For these social psychologists from New York University, self-regulation involved
automatic, nonconscious and habitual processes.

It is not entirely clear if SRL must necessarily involve mental control. And if so,

23

it is not clear what that control looks like: conscious, fragmented, nonconscious,
automatic or a mixture of all of these. These conceptual ambiguities are accompanied by
some practical ambiguities.

If SRL involved mental control and mental control was attributed to the
successful students, then fostering SRL involved homogenizing the nrles of engagement
by teaching all students to be like successful students. If successful students are not
engaging in mental control but mental control is attributed to them, then students who
perform poorly might have unfair expectations for mental cont-cl. Students who are
unsuccessful might be engaging in mental control but that might not be recognized
because it does not ﬁt within acceptable academic behaviors and outcomes. Success,
self-regulated and control are muddy constructs that are often confounded in the
literature. This confounding makes the waters even muddier when considering the

practical implications of teaching SRL.

Primary and Secondary Discourses

It is difﬁcult for me to separate issues of control and habit from ideas about
primary and secondary discourses (Gee, 1992), which, amongst others things, are home
and schools spheres, respectively. Before, I go into that connection I will discuss how
Gee deﬁned primary and second discourses. Gee (1992) deﬁned discourse as social
practice that involved ways of talking, acting, interacting, valuing, believing and social
and physical spaces. The distinction between primary and secondary discourses was a
conceptual differentiation between the socialization into discourses that happens early in

life with family and socialization that happens outside home and peer-group socialization.

24

Socialization into secondary discourses, according to Gee, happens within schools,
churches, gangs and ofﬁces, for example.

For Gee (1992), his discourse-based theory allowed room to explain variations in
academic performance. He noted “behaviors from primary Discourses can also ﬁlter or
drift from primary discourses into various secondary Discourses. Schools have adopted
many values, attitudes, and ways of behaving from middle class homes” (Gee, 1992, p.
110). Those individuals who have their primary and secondary discourses aligned might
experience less tension, conﬂict and fragmentation within secondary discourses, such as
school. From a psychological perspective, it might be said that individuals with this
alignment experience less instances of mental control because the discourses in which
they were socialized extend beyond early home life and sanction existing identities, ways
of knowing, values, beliefs and aspirations in secondary discourses. The alignment of
school and home discourses might mean less socialization, less learning about new
norms, rules for engagement and ways of knowing. For those with a misalignment
between primary and secondary discourses, there might be added learning. This new
learning might mean involve exercising mental control.

Consider an example offered by Chanowitz and Langer (1980) of how two people
at different skill levels experience control when driving. Chanowitz and Langer began an
article describing the behaviors and actions of two people driving: a novice and an
experienced driver. They also include conjectures about the cognitive processes used by
these drivers. Chanowitz and Langer were working towards important questions in this
text: in general, what did it mean to control; and speciﬁcally, to what degree did these

different drivers experience control? They wondered if the experienced driver who

gained a “deeper appreciation” for driving experienced control when driving, at least to
the same degree as the novice driver. The basis for their contemplation stemmed from
the debate surrounding automatic (mindless) and controlled (mindful) processes. The
authors contended that the novice driver exercised more control than the experienced
driver.

Chanowitz and ,Langer (1980) separated people into two categories: learners and
nonleamers. Leamers are those individuals who pay close attention to various details of
an activity. For example, the novice driver because of uncertainty about where the car
will move pays close attention to the turning of the steering wheel and the movement of
the car. Their interaction with the environment is causing constant changes both within
the individual and the activity. Nonleamers are those who have routines for engagement
and pay little attention to the activity as it is being enacted. These individuals, Chanowitz
and Langer argued, are exerting little to no control. Basically, Chanowitz and Langer
contended that individuals experience control when they are engaging in activities that
are not habitualized, and also when there is a change is self and environment.

Let us imagine that the alignment between primary and secondary discourses
affect academic success. The more the home and schools spheres were dissolved, the less
negotiation, validation and learning would need to happen. That is, if one links success
to the alignment between students primary and secondary discourses, in this case home
and school, respectively, then some students will be advantaged and others will be
disadvantaged because they have different learning burdens. If students have that
alignment and are successful as a consequence, then the conceptual conﬂation with SRL

might bring some to attribute executive, intentional and purposive learning skills to those

26

individuals who might rely more on habit and less on mental control.
This discussion brings to me ask two questions, which I ﬁnd have not be
adequately explored in the SRL literature.
1. Does SRL involve mental control or the enactment of habits? Are these the
same?
2. Can SRL be attributed to students based merely on the compatibility of an
individual’s home and school discomses?
These questions are considerably large. In my research study, I do not believe that I will
produce deﬁnitive, blanketed responses. Rather, I just hope to say something smart about

the questions and the responses by considering them from multiple perspectives.

Goals

Researchers contended that setting and pursuing goals is key for SRL (Shah &
Kruglanski, 2000; Zimmerman, 2000). In the educational psychology literature, goals
have been divided into orientations and proximal and distal goal setting. Shah and
Kruglanski (2000) represent these different kinds of goals using a hierarchy. In this
hierarchy, abstract goals (orientations) have subservient goals (proximal and distal goals).
There are some complexities surrounding the structure of goals:

1) How do goal structures develop?

2) Are certain goals necessary for SRL?

3) Must personal goals align with goals set by schools?

Before considering these questions, I discuss the role goals play in SRL. A goal

structure involves an orientation accompanied by larger and smaller goals, which,

27

according to SRL theory, should have internal coherence (Pintrich, 2000; Shah &
Kruglanski, 2000). So, if individuals have orientations to reach mastery for mastery’s
sake, then their distal goals might not be exclusively to get good grades in order to please
parents or peers. The way I read this structure, goal orientation is the platform on which
distal and proximal goals function and make sense. Researchers who focus on goal
networks construe goal networks as hierarchical (Carver, C.S. & Scheier, 2000; Shah &
Kruglanski, 2000) whereby there are overarching goals that inﬂuence both subsets of
goals and the means to achieve those goals.

A number of different kinds of goal orientations have been identiﬁed and for SRL
research, mastery orientation and performance orientation receive the greatest amount of
attention (Pintrich, 2000). Broadly speaking, a mastery orientation is deﬁned by one’s
intrinsic interest to pursue learning for understanding and improving competence. A
performance orientation involves the mobilization of thoughts and behaviors in pursuit of
some normative standard. Individuals with performance goals might work diligently to
understand a topic in order to be seen as competent to their peers, teachers or parents.

These orientations have been; further divided into approach and avoidance types
(Elliot, 2005). Thus, mastery and performance goals were expanded to include the
distinctions between approach and avoidance. So, individuals with mastery-avoidance
orientation seek task mastery to avoid self-referential or task-referential incompetence.
Performance avoidance orientation means that one will avoid tasks so as not to be seen as
incompetent. The approach types have been correlated with more positive academic
outcomes (Beghetto, 2006; Elliot, 2005) and have been associated with SRL (Greene &

Azevedo, 2007). A performance-approach goal is characterized by the drive to

28

outperform others, to be seen as more competent than others. The mastery-approach goal
aligns with mastery orientation.

While there is some controversy surrounding which orientation(s) is necessary for
SRL, there seems to be little disagreement that the mastery-approach orientation is
associated with successful SRL (Greene & Azevedo, 2007). In their review of the SRL
research on mastery and performance goals, Greene and Azevedo (2007) stated

“Most of the research on mastery goal orientations has focused on the approach

form and has almost universally found positive associations, including increased

monitoring of comprehension, more use of cognitive elaboration and organization

strategies, higher levels of theory motivation construct such as self-efficacy and

positive attributions, and more frequent help-seeking behavior” (p.347).
From this statement, the authors found that mastery approach orientation is intimately
tied to the processes and cognitive conditions associated with successful SRL.

In the SRL literature, there is stronger evidence that mastery orientation correlates
with successful SRL and research on performance orientation, which is typically I
considered mastery’s counterpart. Yet, a performance orientation has not yielded
satisfactory correlation or causality to successful SRL (Greene & Azevedo, 2007).
Greene and Azevedo (2007 ) noted that a performance approach has been shown to
correlate more with SRL than performance avoidance. They stated:

Research suggests that performance-avoidance orientations are associated with

negative outcomes, such as the use of fewer cognitive strategies and decreased

self-efﬁcacy and interest. (p. 347)

Another kind of goal orientation, which, for obvious reasons, receives little

29

attention in the SRL literature, is work-avoidance. Somewhat self-explanatory, this
orientation marks kinds of engagement whereby individuals exert energy to avoid doing
work. Individuals with this orientation want to do the least amount of work possible. It
could be argued that a work avoidance orientation requires sophisticated self-regulation.
However, such an orientation has not been associated with academic success.

Mastery and approach orientations have been correlated with SRL and academic
success. What is unclear in the literature is the degree to which these orientations are
domain speciﬁc or stable across contexts. This conceptual ambiguity divides SRL
researchers. Those who draw from sociocultural theory are more likely to view an
orientation as domain speciﬁc. For that reason, the notion of orientation is not used in the
sociocultural literature on SRL because of its connotation of stability and generalizability.
I have noticed that in the sociocultural literature on SRL that the notion of mastery is
used for task speciﬁc engagement. Used this way, mastery means the same thing but it is
context dependent and not a stable feature of one’s engagement.

It could be argued that the social cognitive view of SRL involves orientations as a
component of SRL. As Bandura (2001) noted efﬁcacious people see tasks as challenges
to be mastered. The social cognitive view of SRL has been criticized as relying on stable
and ﬁxed psychological and behavioral conditions, despite the fact that Schunk and
Zimmerman (1997) have outwardly rejected such a characterization.

While having a mastery orientation towards academic tasks has been shown to be
characteristic of successful SRL, researchers have added that there needs to be speciﬁc
academic proximal and distal goals in order to achieve mastery of content (Zimmerman,

1989). Mastery goals signify an orientation towards a task. Thus, it is not enough to be

30

oriented towards mastery; systems of long and short term goals must be set, pursued and
modiﬁed, if necessary, in service of mastery goals. These goals could involve the pursuit
of better study strategies, success on an assignment, or desire for certain grades. For
SRL, it is important that students set goals and strive for the achievement of those goals.
There are some conceptual complexities with goal orientation and goal pursuit
that have implications for notions of agency. The ﬁrst complexity involves the
origination of goals. The second, which will be discussed with the ﬁrst, involves the
alignment between personal goals and institutional goals. The third involves the

obligation to pursue goals.

Origination of Goals

How could one tell the difference between goals that originated from within and
goals that originate ﬁom without? When thinking about goals, Martin and McLellan
(2007) suggested that the origination of goals would change the degree to which SRL
could be constituted as an expression of agency. This suggestion made sense. If the
goals towards which students were to regulate their learning were deﬁned and determined
by the institution of schooling, then assigning agency to self-regulated action becomes
complicated.

As noted above, certain orientation lend themselves better to SRL than others.
So, if a teacher crafts pedagogy to elicit, invoke or shape a certain orientation, is that
orientation one that is formed within or from without? This question is tied to
epistemological differences between constructivism and socioculturalism. A

constructivist perspective (Martin, 2004b) provides the conceptual tools to make it

31

possible to think of the internal origination of goals, or at least the internal mediation of
the goals. From a socioculturalist perspective, goal orientation and proximal and distal
goal formation could be argued to have originated from interaction with the external
world. Some theorists suggest that discerning the origination of a goal is not simple
(Martin & McLellan, 2007), though conceptual frameworks might help to obscure such
complexity.

While the social world is taken into account, Martin and McLellan (2007) are less
optimistic than other SRL researchers that the origination of goals and other SRL
processes could be delineated. Expressing incredulity they stated,

“. . .is it really possible to make such distinctions on the basis of whether or not the

goal-setting, strategic acting, monitoring, and evaluation said to attend the

worldly activity of human persons is self-generated and self-determined versus
occasioned and determined externally by circumstances and others.” (Martin &

McLellan, 2007, p. 10)

In this quotation, the authors speak broadly about a variety of features of SRL and
question the possibility of discerning their origins. The question to consider here is: how
do individuals know when they are pursuing self originated goals as opposed to goals
determined by external factors. Martin and McLellan (2007) would suggest that this
question makes sense in modernist construction of the subject in which the individual is
rendered separate from the world. With this separation, there is a set of extreme
explanations that range between the individual and structural determinism. Martin and
McLellan (2007) suggested that it is not so easy to know what is determining what

individuals do and cast doubt on the rational agent steering all behavior and thinking and

32

is responsible for life’s outcomes. They also cast doubt on attributing the origination of

goals to the social world.

Obligation to Pursue Goals

As Popkewitz (1996) noted, setting goals and being oriented towards goals are a
modern cultural artifact. Popkewitz was not necessarily suggesting that dming pre-
modernity individuals were not striving towards anything. Instead, it seemed to suggest
that goals in modern times have taken on a different meaning. Setting and pursuing goals
is a key feature of many accounts of SRL. Its role in the social cognitive perspective is
especially important because of its direct link to self-efﬁcacy. A concern that needs to be
addressed is the degree to which students’ goals need to be aligned with goals set out by
parents and teachers. In other words, are successful self-regulated learners those who
have the same goals as their teachers and parents, and can effectively achieve those goals
in the time expected?

If goals are aligned, then work does not need to be done to align individuals’
goals with goals set out by teachers and parents. If goals are not aligned, then work must
be done to make those goals ﬁtnctional and adaptable within schools. The conﬂation of
the self-regulated learner with the successful student supports the necessity of this
alignment. Some researchers have suggested that self-regulation does not necessarily
involve this alignment. Paris, Bymes and Paris (2001) suggested that one’s expression of
identity requires self-regulation, even if that identity competes with academic success.
Arguably, those children might not be considered as regulating their learning because the

regulation in which they are engaged is not academically sanctioned.

33

There might be more of an obligation associated with the orientation because, for
example, a work avoidance orientation might not be effective at organizing subservient
goals in pursuit of academic achievement. Considering orientation, it world seem that
students who are going to be effective at SRL would need to have a particular orientation.
In this way, an alignment between personal goals and expectations of schools is needed.
For proximal and distal goals, there seems to be more opportunity for self-determination.

There could many different sub-goals used to achieve a higher goal.

The Ethics of SRL

Up to this point, I focused my literature review on some of the conceptual
complexities associated with SRL. In this section, 1 shift my attention to the ethics of
SRL. The discussion in this section is part of the conceptual ambiguities. I separated the
topics in this section because it had to with some of functional and ethical implications of
SRL. In this section, I explore what researchers and theorists suggest SRL does or is
supposed to do. I discuss two interrelated topics: individual and social betterment and

empowerment and disempowerment.

Individual and Social Betterment

A review of the literature on self-regulated learning revealed that researchers and
theorists treat SRL as a form of individual betterment (e.g., Zimmerman, 2008). Martin
(2004) would describe notions of individual betterment embedded in the literature on

SRL as a focus on better learning and study strategies. Martin pointed out that this focus

34

 

on individual betterment does not necessarily equate to, what he termed as, civic virtue or
civic responsibility, or what I call here, social betterment. The conceptual complexity
here involves exploring the degree to which SRL connects to self-interested goals and
social goals.

Steven Graham and Karen Harris are two proliﬁc SRL researchers, who have
developed the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model. In a research study
conducted by Santangelo, Harris and Graham (2008), the authors argued that SRSD
supports the development of planning, drafting and revising of written texts that mirrors
the kinds of strategies of professional writers. Also, Zimmerman (2008) stated:

SRL is viewed as proactive processes that students use to acquire academic skill,

such as setting goals, selecting and deploying strategies, and self-monitoring

one’s effectiveness, rather than as a reactive event that happens to students due to

impersonal forces” (p. 168).

Even those researchers who treat SRL as an event rather than an enduring aptitude
emphasize individual outcomes (e.g., Perry, 2004a). It is fairly common for SRL
researchers and theorists to express the need for individuals to improve control over
emotions, thoughts and behaviors for the purpose of improving academic performance.

These conceptions of SRL focus on individual pursuits. Martin (2004a) critiqued
these conceptions of SRL. He argued that teaching students to be self-regulated learners
is an approach to teaching and learning that is individualistic and reductionist. In
addition, he (2004a) stated, “Knowing how to study effectively, or to motivate oneself are
important and useful, but hardly equate with hallmarks of personhood such as civic virtue

and responsible living” (Martin, 2004a, p. 22). According to Martin, the conceptual piece

35

that is responsible for these conceptions of SRL has to do with modern conceptions of the
self. As Martin (2004a) argued, research studies involving the notion of self, such as
self-regulation, view the self as rational and isolated with an interior core responsible for
actions and thoughts. Martin (20043) argued that such studies rely on a self that are
inadequate and irrelevant for the education of persons. He argued that in order to educate
individuals for democratic participation, core assumptions of the modernist self must be
challenged. He argued that emphasizing a self with a profound interiority, a
predisposition for self-mastery and detached from historical and cultural terrain renders
self-conceptions “empty” with little recourse to virtue and civic responsibility.

What if individual betterment was viewed as social betterment? In terms of
economics, it might be argued that individual self-interested pursuits beneﬁt society.
Arguably, this logic could be extended to include the pursuit of individual achievement
by working on individual learning strategies. If SRL could be used to support socially
desirable and moral behaviors and intellectual achievements for individuals, then would
not all individuals beneﬁt? Maybe individual betterment could support better
competition in the global market place by creating a better workforce. Zimmerman
(2000) argued that self-regulation could help solve social problems, such smoking, teen
pregnancy and crime. Considering schools, one social beneﬁt that Zimmerman, Bonner
and Kovach (1996) mentioned was that individuals who self-regulate learning could

serve as models for others, and thus, a be a community resource.

Empowering and Disempowering

In this section, I explore empowerment and disempowerment as they relate to

36

 

SRL. I present literature on SRL that suggests it is a humanistic effort to realize our
personhood by being able to exercise control over our lives. This treatment of SRL is
typically found in the literature on self-regulation, especially from the social cognitive
perspective. There is also literature that suggests SRL is disempowering. There is not
much literature infomring this latter consideration.

Yowell and Smylie (1999) referred to the motivation literature to deﬁne
empowerment as “students’ capacities to understand behavior-outcome relationships
within given contexts and their belief that they have the capability to enact the behaviors
necessary for such desired outcomes” (p.478). According to Mahoney and Thoresen
(1974), individuals exercise self-control by monitoring behavior, discerning
environmental contingencies, and altering behavior or the environment, which would
alter behavior, for the purpose of generating meaningful and positive experiences. Such
self-regulation, they argued, led to dignity, autonomy, self-actualization and freedom.
The authors reasoned that part of the humanistic quality of heightened self-control comes
from the increased degree of responsibility and control of actions. Mahoney and
Thoresen further reasoned that environmental cues and consequences are ultimately
shaping behavior, so if individuals develop awareness of those contingencies they could
actively shape them. For Mahoney and Thoresen, this behavioral self-control carries with
it connotations of individual emancipation. From this line of thinking, if the social is
oppressive, then understanding the ways individuals are implicated in such a system will
help to free oneself from that system.

Another way to think about SRL as empowering is by considering the role of

schools in social mobility. If social mobility is an individual’s goal and school is a

37

 

 

 

 

 

channel for social mobility, SRL could provide the skills and tools to perform well in
school. Zimmerman (1998) suggested that there was an association between SRL and
social and economic upward mobility. In the manual that I used for this dissertation, the
authors made an analogy between SRL and learning to ﬁsh (Zimmerman, Bonner &
Kovach, 1996). They argued that learning to ﬁsh is similar to learning academic
regulation, in the sense that long-term and self-reliant skills will be invaluable through
ones’ life course. From this way of drinking, being given ﬁsh fostered dependency and
helplessness.
Considering the section on individual and social betterment and the discussion up

to this point on empowerment, SRL could be seen as empowering because it could be a
form of or lead to:

l. democratic participation

2. lifelong learning

3. self-sufficiency

4. academic success

5. economic upward mobility

There are some features of SRL that complicate idea of empowerment in SRL. I

began to consider this other side of empowerment by considering the relationship
between the self-regulated learner and the successﬁrl student. When successful students
are conﬂated with the self-regulated learner, which is a conceptual limitations made by
teachers and researchers, facilitating successful academic performance becomes reduced
to the propagation of scripts generated from studying what successful students think and

do. Prescribing such scripts for academic engagement blurs the distinction between self-

38

 

 

 

r____ ..._.____ _

 

 

regulated academic performance and performance that is obedience. While SRL can be
productive, that is, enabling efﬁcient and effective ways to learn, the generation of scripts
for SRL has normative components to them. In my research, I would like to explore the
relationship between this production and normalization.

Not only did I consider the normalization associated with SRL as
disempowerment, I also considered the degree to which learning academic self-regulation
involved obedience. Post, Boyer and Brett (2006) cite literature from the early 19803 by
researchers in developmental psychology, who stated that

self-regulation ‘is the ability to comply with a request, to initiate and cease

activities according to situational demands, to modulate the intensity, frequency,

and duration of verbal and motor acts in social and education settings.’ In
addition Kopp highlights the sophisticated cognitive system enabling a young
child ‘to postpone acting upon a desired object or goal, and to generate socially

approved behavior in the absence of external monitors. (p.5)

Based on this understanding of self-regulation, which the authors stated combine
adaptation and compliance with control over cognitive systems, it seems reasonable that
students’ non-compliance to school expectations serve as indices of failure at self-
regulation. From this treatment of SRL, compliance and the generation of socially
approved behaviors—in other words, obedience—is self-regulation.

Researchers who hold this view of self-regulated learning seem to believe that the
purpose of SRL is to help manage behavior. So in this view, there is little that
distinguishes SRL from obedience. Ostensibly, many theories of SRL would not

explicitly espouse compliance as self-regulation, even though it seems reasonable to do

39

 

so, especially given the rationale that all individuals are choosing to comply and are
engaging in “sophisticat ” self-regulation of behavior and cognition. Instead, it seems
the compliance component is subtler.

Others within educational psychology view SRL differently. Martin and
McMellan (2007) characterized SRL as “the disguised manipulation of student self-
surveillance in the service of the institutional mandates of schools” (p. 2). While the
connection between self-surveillance and institutional mandates makes sense, I will avoid
describing teaching SRL as “disguised manipulation” because the connotation is that
power is located in a ﬁxed and creative source. Holding on to that meaning makes more
sense from Marxist or neo-Marxist standpoint. Anyway, attending to Martin and
Mclellan’s treatment of SRL helps to consider another interpretation of SRL, an
interpretation that certainly makes sense from the neo-Marxist position of Bowles and

Gintis (1976).

Chapter Conclusion

In this literature review, I discussed some enduring and complex issues with SRL.
Some of these issues extend beyond SRL and have been enduring topics in a variety of
disciplines. Individual human agency, for example, is a notion that I have encountered in
sociology, philosophy and psychology. There have been and continue to be many
debates surround issues with agency, and other issues as well, such as freedom,
empowerment and the social good. In my dissertation research, I am not suggesting that I
could adequately address all these complexities. What I tried to do was keep these

complexities in mind when I analyzed case study data from multiple perspectives. Aside

 

from my effort to support academic success for a struggling learner, I wanted to see how
one person’s experience learning academic self-regulation illuminated some insights into
the complexities that I have noted.

The use of multiple frameworks, those not traditionally used to talk about SRL,
could help to differentiate conceptions of SRL. Understanding this complexity could
promote the careful crafting of instructional strategies that support students’ successful

academic performance.

41

 

 

Chapter 3
Methods
In this chapter, I discuss the empirical, educational and conceptual importance of

conducting a single person case study of self-regulated learning (SRL). The features of
the methods are organized by case—study design, introduction to Karen, intervention and
analytical frameworks. In each section, I discuss what I did and the rationale for making
certain decisions. It was difﬁcult to contain all of the methodology in this chapter. While
there is a large portion of the methodology here, there is more dispersed in other chapters

where some of my analyses are presented.

Case-study design

To restate my research question: how could using multiple perspectives illuminate
some of the complexities of SRL as they related to the lived experience of one student?
In my research study, I worked with one student. The single-person case study was
appropriate for practical, ethical, methodological and professional considerations. In this
section, I discuss the contribution of conducting a single person case study and how this
examination contributes to the literature on SRL. In this case study I have had the
opportunity to explore SRL at much deeper levels than was available in any existing
literature. Aside from contributing to the literature on SRL, this case study approach also
provided a rich place from which to start my career as a researcher. “ﬁth a deeper and
more nuanced understanding of SRL, I am in position to design future studies of SRL at

different scales and sites.

42

 

Why One Student?

From a social cognitive perspective, becoming a self-regulated learner requires
speciﬁc contextual conditions, time, and work. As Zimmerman (1998) contended,
learning to academically self regulate requires many hours of practice in contexts where
students have choice and control. He reasoned that because classrooms are seldom places
where students have opportunities to choose or control, enacting or developing SRL
happens primarily outside of school. From this perspective, learning to academically
self-regulate has more to do with out of school experiences. Zimmerman (1994) also
stated that learning to academically self-regulate happens in a broader context that serves
to support SRL. In that sense, a concerted effort among many people, such as parents,
teachers and coaches is needed (Zimmerman, 1998).

My implementation of an intervention to foster SRL required close and intensive
collaboration with teachers, parents, siblings and Karen. It also required many hours of
working with Karen outside of class. To include multiple participants in this research
study could have led to less individual attention to Karen. It could have led to less time
collaborating with and consulting individuals involved in Karen’s life. It could have led
to less attention to the broader context in which the Karen operated. Typically, case
studies are justiﬁed because they provide in-depth analyses. That is true for this study.
Also, the case study was advantageous because it provided me with the means to work to
effectively implement the intervention, study its impact on Karen’s academic
achievement and carefully craft and revise the intervention in order to best meet Karen’s
needs.

Looking this closely at SRL has worked to support my efforts to become a better

43

teacher of SRL by understanding the process involved with teaching and learning it. By
closely examining the intervention and Karen’s experience with it, I was able to explore a
number of points of tension with SRL. The case study approach afforded me the
opportunity to consider the complexities and limitations of teaching and learning
academic self—regulation.

While there are limitations with using one participant, the research has the
potential to contribute to the literature on SRL by closely examining the lived experience
of one student who is learning academic self-regulation. One of the limitations of the
study has to do with generalizability. On a modem epistemological plane, a sample of
one does not make sense for generalizability. On a postmodern epistemological plane,
however, a sample of one is different: it broadens understanding by inviting different
kinds of readings and disrupting taken-for—granted assumptions. With one participant,
my goal was not to generalize principles of SRL to other cases. Rather, my goal was to
push researchers and teachers to expand their repertoires and increase the variety of

perspectives for understanding SRL.

Length of Time

The data-generation phase of this case study was four and one-half months long.
Researchers disagree about the amount of time needed for SRL to be implemented. On
one side, researchers might resist the idea that time used for cognitive training needs little
consideration for SRL. The argument for this side is that certain contextual features
facilitate student SRL. That is, there are certain instructional design practices that

support SRL. Therefore, the need for teachers to acquire the skills, knowledge and

44

dispositions to structure their classrooms to foster SRL becomes essential. This position
reﬂects a Montessori idea that spontaneous self-regulation emerges in the absence of
conﬁning environments.

On the other hand, researchers contended that students need many of hours of
training and practice in order to learn to academically self-regulate (Zimmerman, 1998).
From this perspective, instructional design should not determine the enactment of SRL.
Part of the power of SRL is for its efficacy to help students harness their own personal
power in order to overcome environmental constraints (Zimmerman, 1989). Connected
with the SRL manual, I will operate with the assumption that Karen could develop SRL
with practice and training.

The question about length of time is important to consider for ethical reasons. I
wanted to be sure that I spent an adequate amount of time with Karen to optimize the
beneﬁt. Methodologically, the justiﬁcation for the length of time the intervention
becomes more important if I were exarrrining the effectiveness of the intervention. The
research study is focused on what illuminating some of the complexities of SRL while .
involved with an intervention. With that said, it was still important to consider a
reasonable amount of time to increase Karen’s chances of adopting SRL and to give the
intervention its due.

Perry and Drummond (2002) worked with third grade students and after one year
of exposure to pedagogy designed to foster SRL, the students in their research showed
signs of SRL. Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1996) suggested the children with the
proper guidance and right tools could start regulating their learning immediately.

Zimmerman (1998) made the distinction between expert and naive self-regulated

45

learners. To be an expert, Zimmerman contended that it takes several hundred hours of
practice with SRL. The time commitment in the intervention was much more modest and
generating expertise with SRL might have been difficult. While some researchers have
discussed speciﬁc time demands for SRL, others have suggested the time can be variable
(Harris, Graham, Mason & Saddler, 2002). Some of the reasons for variation in time
have to do with different skills levels, dispositions and pedagogical practices. Part of the

assessment of the time came from analysis of Karen and the experiences with school.

Research Sites

My research had two sites: home and school. I observed in Karen’s classroom
three times a week for two hours a day for the entire ﬁve-month research period. I
observed Karen in a variety of classes (see table 1). Out of all her classes, Karen liked
science the most and liked social studies and math the least. The reason for wanting
variability with content was to account for the potential variability of different kinds of
engagement. The purpose of the observations was to explore how SRL strategies were
used, if at all, in the classroom and to understand how the teachers support or curtail
Karen’s SRL efforts. Observations were also used as ways to assess and discuss Karen’s
engagement and understanding. I minimized my interactions with Karen in classrooms in
order to avoid casting a spotlight on her. I wanted to avoid potential peer ridicule or
speculation of academic deﬁciency or abnormality. In the classroom I observed the
participant’s strategies for engaging with classroom tasks using an instrument with both a

SRL checklist (appendix D) and space for ﬁeld notes.

Table 1
School Observation Schedule

 

 

PM Frequency Total Subjectts)
General 1-3 Hours 2-3 times a week/ 36 hours Social studies,
Classroom 4 1/2 months math and
language arts
Science 55 minutes Attended 7 7 hours Science
consecutive class
periods in the middle
of the research period
*Resource 30-55 6 times throughout 5 hours Math and
Room minutes observation period Language arts
Other 45-60 2 times throughout 2 hours Individualized
minutes observation period Education Plan
meeting and
the parent and
teacher
conference

 

*Karen was pulled out once a week by the special education teacher and two times a week by the
teacher responsible for fulﬁlling title I services.

Supporting SRL took place mostly in the Karen’s home (see Table 3). At this
location, I worked with Karen 4 to 6 hours a week. We worked Monday through
. Thursday. We never worked on a Friday because she did not have homework. That was
her decision. Also, each Friday at 6:00pm Karen would go to her biological mother’s
house. I describe Karen’s family structure in the next section. The data sources were

audio-recorded sessions with Karen. During this time, I worked with Karen 15 to

47

sometimes 25 hours each evening for 3 to 4 days each week on completing her
homework. When working with Karen to complete homework assignments, I

implemented the intervention. Below is a skeleton of a typical day for Karen.

 

 

Table 2

Daily Schedule

Time Emu

7 :00-7z30am Karen wakes up and gets ready for school
7:50am Karen leaves to catch the bus

8:45am Karen arrives at school

8:55am School begins

3:48pm School ends

4:304:45pm Karen takes the bus and arrives home
5:00pm ‘ I arrive at Karen’s home
*5:00-7:00pm Work with Karen on homework

 

*This amount of time varied: sometimes it was more and sometimes it was less.

Table 3
Research Sites

 

 

 

DLtion Frequency Total Subjectts)
School 1-3 hours a 2-3 times a week Total = 50 Social studies,
day hours math
language arts,
science, IEP
meeting, parent
and teacher
conference
Home 1.5-2.5 hours 3-4 times a week Total = 80 Homework,
a day hours library, bookstore
Introduction to Karen

Karen was an upper elementary student who was identiﬁed by parents as

academically struggling. Karen was from a midwestem elementary school with 5"I and

6'” grade students. From the parents’ description, it seemed that she could beneﬁt from a

SRL intervention. Karen was described as struggling with concentration, comprehension

and motivation in school and performing formal academic tasks at home. In the 2"" grade

Karen was diagnosed as having a central auditory processing disability (CAPD). In this

section, I discuss the reasons for choosing a student who was struggling, the beneﬁts of

focusing on an upper elementary student and describe features of the CAPD, as discussed

in the Individualized Education Plan meeting and literature on CAPD, that speak to the

potential beneﬁts of a SRL intervention.

49

Before presenting a portrait of Karen, I would like to describe some features of
her family. Karen lives in a household with ﬁve people: her stepmother, who is
identiﬁed as Caucasian, and her biological father, who identiﬁed as Mexican American,
one full sister and one half-sister. Karen’s biological mother, identiﬁed as Caucasian,
lives in a town that is 20 minutes away. While class identity can be difﬁcult to determine
precisely, I identiﬁed Karen’s parents as working class. Some criteria for class
identiﬁcation were cultural identity, occupational status, income level, and educational
background. As discussed in chapter 5, Karen’s family displayed similar cultural
practices as compared to the working class families in Lareau’s (1989/2000; 2003)
research studies. Francisco, Karen’s father, worked for a local cable company as an
installer and Laura, Karen’s step mother, worked from her home as a manicurist. Both
Laura and Francisco have high school diplomas and did not attend higher education. The
household did not contain many books, and the parents regarded computers as game-

playing devices.

Choosing a Struggling Student

I began with an assumption that was consistent with a longstanding one made by
many researchers, namely successful students are self-regulated and unsuccessful
students are not. Often researchers and teachers conﬂate the successful student with the
self-regulated learner (van Den Hurk, 2006; Whipp & Chiarelli, 2004; Zimmerman &
Martinez-Pons, 1986). Concomitantly, unsuccessful students are characterized as not
self-regulated or naive self-regulated learners.

By operating with the same assumption, I am starting with a number of

50

presuppositions about the student and the student’s learning habits that might not
necessarily be justiﬁed. One of these presuppositions has to do with the source of
academic difficulty. By using “struggling student” as a criterion for SRL intervention, I
was positioning Karen as the source of that struggle. Although I ﬁnd it problematic to
use academic success to judge the degree to which one is self-regulated and to make
claims about the potential beneﬁt of a SRL intervention, I needed to use that criterion in
order to at least begin research with a participant.

From the data, I found that Karen was having difﬁculties in school. She struggled
most with math, social studies and language arts. Part of these struggles had to do with
her disﬁke for writing and her struggles with reading. A reﬂection of these struggles is
represented in the grades listed below (see Table 4). There were also some indications of
Karen’s academic struggles from the Iowa Achievement Test. In all parts of this
standardized test, she was in the 40’” percentile. or below. While I did not have access to
all this data early in the research study, examination of earlier report cards, initial
interviews with teachers and parents’ reports, and examination of IEP documents led me
to conclude that Karen could beneﬁt from a SRL intervention.

Zimmerman (2000) argued that there is a link between poor academic
performance and low self-regulatory skill. He stated, “there is evidence that students
who have trouble self-regulating their academic studying achieve more poorly in school
and present more deportment problems for their teachers” (Zimmerman, 2000, p. 26).
Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1996) stated that students who are struggling in school
improve their academic performance through self-regulatory “training” (p. 136). Karen

was struggling in most subjects. Also, I discuss later literature on Central Auditory

51

Processing Disability (CAPD) that identiﬁed SRL training as a way to overcome the

cognitive limitations purported to result from CAPD.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 4
Report Cards
Subject Report Interim Interim Final Report
Card Report Report # 2 Card
3/15 4/16 5/14 6/14
Science A- A- A A-
English/Lang. D D D D+
Arts
Social Studies 0 C D C-
Spelling B B + B- B
Math C A- B- C

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Choosing an Upper Elementary Student

There were a number of reasons for choosing an upper elementary student. First,
it is important to note that in the early 19905, researchers contended that elementary-aged
students were incapable of SRL. Perhaps Piaget and his universal stage theory of logical
reasoning could be credited for such an understanding. According to Piaget and Inhelder
(2000), abstract thought does not occur until the ﬁnal stage of logico-mathematical
development, which begins around the 11’“ year of a child’s life. From this perspective,
metacogrrition, which could be understood as a form of abstract thought, might not be
cognitively possible in early elementary children. Towards the latter part of the 1990s to

the present, however, numerous research studies were conducted that denounced the

52

supposed self-regulatory incapacity of elementary-aged students, especially those in
upper elementary (Harris et al., 2003; Hickey, 2003; Perry & Drummond, 2002). Part of
this shift had to do with changing conceptions of notions, such as metacognition, which
are closely associated with SRL. Another factor contributing to the shift might have to
do with a general incredulity towards a predetermined, universal and hierarchical stage
theory of human development. Another possibility for this shift towards the study of
elementary students and self-regulated learning might have to do with perceptions about
shaping certain learning dispositions.

In my practicum research, secondary education teachers viewed their students as
already knowing how to learn and, therefore, attributed academic performance to the
exertion or effort. It is my contention that there was the underlying assumption amongst
my participants that there were more “moldable” moments in different points of students’
developmental trajectories. So in secondary education, molding dispositions to self-
regulate learning was viewed as more challenging, if not impossible, especially without
the recruitment of other teachers, parents, coaches and peers. Therefore, I believed it is
more likely that elementary and middle school classrooms would be viewed as possible
spaces to teach students to regulate learning. Researchers have identiﬁed these years as
important for fostering SRL development (see, Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach, 1996).
If teachers perceived that elementary aged children are more moldable for SRL, then it
makes sense that the research study be conducted with either upper elementary or middle

school students because with teacher collaboration the beneﬁt of intervention could be

optimized; the teacher would be more willing to create a space for teaching and

supporting SRL.

53

Another reason for choosing an elementary student was the beneﬁts of SRL
interventions for this population. Many researchers have focused their attention on
understanding the underlying mechanism of and factors that affect elementary students’
SRL, especially for elementary students who have been identiﬁed as having special
learning needs (e.g., see Harris et al., 2003; Perry, 2004). In these research studies,
researchers attributed improved academic performance inside and outside of the

classroom to their capacity for self-regulation.

Choosing a Student with CAPD

There was not much literature on Central Auditory Processing Disability (CAPD)
before the early 1990s. It is a complex disability to understand because it is a
multifaceted neurological phenomenon. When I interviewed the parents, they did not
know the name of the disability or any information about the disability and its speciﬁc
affects on academic performance. To better understand the disability, I relied heavily on
the Individualized Education Plan documents, which included reports from the
audiologist, and the literature on CAPD. I also interviewed Karen’s teachers about the
disability.

Researchers have described central auditory processing as “what we do with what
we hear” (Stecker, 1998, p. 1). Ferre (2006) noted that Central Auditory Processing
Disability refers to a “deﬁcit in the perceptual processing of auditory stimuli and the
neurobiologic activity underlying that processing” (p. 225). From my reading of the
literature, researchers acknowledge two points of auditory perceptual deﬁcits: l)

perceiving linguistic distinctions, such as tone, pitch, frequency and loudness, and 2)

S4

interpreting these distinctions. In other words, researchers of CAPD recognize that there
could be a dysfunction with one’s auditory faculties or dysfunctions at multiple points
where auditory stimuli are interpreted and processed. In either situation, these auditory
deﬁcits are treated as having biological bases.

There are many functions for which the central auditory processing (CAP) system
is responsible. First, it consists of auditory discrimination, which is the ability to group
sounds according to perceived similarity or difference. Auditory memory is the
component that is responsible for storing and recalling auditory information. As I discuss
later, the audiologist identiﬁed auditory memory as the source of Karen’s learning
difficulties. Another ﬁrnction of the CAP system is auditory perception, which concerns
the reception and understanding of sounds and words. It plays a signiﬁcant part in
reading skills, managing verbal information, communication and social relationships.
Auditory-vocal association consists of the interaction between what is heard and verbal
response. Auditory synthesis is responsible for combining sounds or syllables to
formulate comprehensible patterns (words) and de-combining words into separate
sounds. Auditory-vocal automaticity is the ability to predict how future linguistic events
will be heard by utilizing past experience. Auditory ﬁgure-ground is the component that
helps one focus on some sounds while diminishing other less important ones. It is due to
this component that someone can listen to another person talking in a railway station,
where a lot of environmental noise exists.

As per the audiologist’s evaluation, there were indications that Karen’s auditory
faculties were functioning at a normal level. In the evaluation, the audiologist noted:

Conventional audiometry was completed. Pure tone test results indicated hearing

55

within normal limits bilaterally. Word discrimination abilities were excellent for

both ears. Impedance audiometry revealed normal middle ear functioning

bilaterally. Ipsilateral acoustic reﬂexes were present at nomral levels for both

ears.
The assessment in which Karen showed evidence of a central auditory processing
disability was the Staggered Spondaic Word (SSW) test. The SSW test is a ten-minute
evaluation that measures binaural integration abilities through the dichotic presentation of .
spondees. In other words, the right and left ears were presented with different spondees,
which are words with long meters. These spondees overlapped. For example, a right ear
was presented with the word “upstairs” and the left ear was presented with the word
“downtown.” The “up” syllable was played without competing auditory stimuli. The
second syllable “stairs” would be overlapped with the ﬁrst auditory syllable of the second
spondee, which is presented in the left ear. The second syllable “town” would be played
without competing auditory stimuli. According to this test, an individual with CAPD
might construct the auditory stimuli as “uptown” and “downstairs” rather than “upstairs”
and “downtown.”

The SSW was among a battery of assessments that were intended to measure
Karen’s CAP. Another examination was the SCAN-C. Overall, the audiologist
summarized the auditory processing evaluation by noting the results of the assessments
indicate that Karen has difﬁculties with Tolerance-Fading Memory (T FM) and lexical
decoding. Individuals in the auditory tolerance-fading memory category are thought to
have severe auditory-processing problems because they are highly distracted by

background sounds and have poor auditory memories (Stecker, 1998). However, for

56

those in this group, school performance is not typically far from grade level, and the
resulting reading disabilities stem more from limited comprehension than from an
inability to sound out the words (Stecker, 1998).

Because Central Auditory Processing Disability is believed to have a neurological
basis, research on brain plasticity has been used to justify the need for targeted
experiences, mental training (self-regulatory control) and behavior modiﬁcation to
overcome the limitations of the disability (Banai & Kraus, 2006; Chermak, 1998;
Stecker, 1998). In books and handbooks on CAPD, there are many references made to
the importance of SRL for overcoming limitations in the CAP system. Additionally, in
an interview with the special education teacher, she stated that Karen would beneﬁt from
SRL. On her IEP, it speciﬁcally listed that Karen needed to develop self-advocacy.
While not synonymous with SRL, there was overlap between the way the special
education teacher interpreted self-advocacy and SRL.

In the literature on CAPD, there were speciﬁc overlaps between the social
cognitive model of SRL and the kinds of self-regulation important for those with CAPD
(e.g., see Chermak, 1998). I chose the intervention Developing Self-Regulated Learners:
Beyond Achievement to Self-Efﬁcacy because it is a comprehensive manual from a
widely cited ﬁamework. While this alignment might seem fortuitous, I noticed in
literature on CAPD that self-regulation in general has been viewed as an important for

overcoming the limitations resulting from CAPD.

Intervention

The primary source for the intervention was Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach’s

S7

(1996) manual titled Developing Self-Regulated Learners: Beyond Achievement to Self-

mwy. The manual is a comprehensive source identifying the important components
of SRL and strategies for individuals to use in order help others acquire or sharpen their
SRL skills. There were documents for self—evaluation, self-monitoring, time
management and goal setting. They were important external sources for managing
learning. In this section, I describe the intervention and how it shaped my interaction

with Karen.

Baseline Data

In order to develop a baseline understanding of Karen’s academic performance, I
interviewed Karen’s parents and teachers and administered the Motivated Strategies for
Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). Amongst other SRL components, the self-report
survey measures individual’s self-efﬁcacy, goal orientation and learning strategy use. As
Schunk (2005) noted, the scale has good internal reliability and demonstrates moderate
correlations with academic success. The scale has been used by many and, as Schunk
argued, will continue to be a valuable instrument for the study of SRL. The items
pertaining speciﬁcally to self-efficacy in the MSLQ are general perceptions about
expectancy success.

To ascertain more information, I conducted planned and unplanned interviews
with Karen, her teachers and her parents (see Table 3). I asked questions about Karen’s
grades, classroom performance, homework strategies, test scores and general concerns
about her academic performance. This baseline data was used to consider the impact of

the intervention. These interviews were designed to get more information about Karen

58

 

 

and use that information to ensure that the intervention was in Karen’s best interest. The
unplanned interviews with the parents randomly occurred while visiting Karen at her
home. The unplanned interviews with the teacher occurred during classroom

observations. We typically conversed when students went to recess or gym.

 

 

 

Table 5
Interviews
Planned Unplanned
Total Duratr Format Total D 'on
Hours on Hours Format
Taped; Semi- Field notes and
Parents 3 45-60 structured 6 5-15 no recording;
min minutes Semi-structured
Taped; Semi- Recorded and
Teacher 2 45-60 structured 8 20—25 ﬁeld notes;
nrin minutes Semi-structured
Taped; Semi- Some recorded
Child 3 30-45 structured 4 10—20 and ﬁeld notes;
min rrrinutes Semi-structured
Self-efﬁcacy

Important for the intervention was developing appropriate levels of self-efficacy
and developing the skills and knowledge to evaluate and monitor thoughts beliefs,
behavior and environment. Initially, I used a number of strategies to foster appropriate
levels of self-efﬁcacy (see also chapter 4). Zimmerman (1989) deﬁned self-efﬁcacy as
one’s beliefs about capabilities to organize and implement actions necessary to attain

designated performance or skill for speciﬁc tasks. I worked with Karen to support the

59

identiﬁcation, measurement and possible alteration of self-efﬁcacy in ways that were
supposed to make successful self-regulation of task completion possible. To support
productive levels of self-efﬁcacy, it was important for Karen to recognize, measure, and
evaluate those beliefs.

Early in the research project, there was an emphasis on providing Karen with the
tools to reﬂect on her self-efﬁcacy. The tools that I used to help Karen recognize,
measure and evaluate self-efﬁcacy beliefs were self-efﬁcacy scales, journal writings and
daily interactions. The ﬁrst tool I used was quizzes. For the intervention, Karen was
expected to take quizzes and predict the number she thought she would get correct and
rate the conﬁdence of her prediction. The authors of the intervention suggested that
quizzes with only ten questions should be used because plotting results would and
charting changes were more manageable.

Before taking a quiz, Karen was expected to predict the number of questions she
thought she would get correct. The prediction was supposed to be 0-10. After the
prediction, Karen was expected to rate the degree of conﬁdence in that prediction. This
rating was on a 3-point scale: not very sure (-1), quite sure (0), and absolutely sure (+1).
The conﬁdence rating is used to adjust the prediction. The authors stated the “self-
efﬁcacy is deﬁned as the estimated score after the point adjustment” (Zimmerman,
Bonner & Kovach, 1996, p.27). For example, if Karen predicted she would get 6 but was
not very sure (-l), her self-efficacy would be a 5.

These adjusted scores were then supposed to be graphed with actual test scores to
see the discrepancy between the two. The authors stated “students who misjudge their

self-efﬁcacy will quickly see their errors and will adjust their standards when judging

their self-efficacy in the future” (Zimmerman, Bonner & Kovach, 1996, p.29). From this
tool to monitor self-efﬁcacy, the importance of aligning performance with beliefs is
apparent. According to the authors of the intervention, it was important to learn to
monitor self-efﬁcacy because it focused attention on beliefs about effectiveness of
learning methods. The authors also stated that monitoring self-efficacy by rating and
graphing it could support evaluation of the effectiveness of beliefs for homework and test
preparation. The key outcome of monitoring self-eﬂicacy was to associate beliefs with
learning practices. .

I discuss in chapter four some of the difﬁculties with this self-efficacy
measurement, namely Karen’s reluctance to predict, do extra work and rate her
conﬁdence. There were other ways suggested to evaluate and monitor self-eﬂicacy. I
used daily interactions to get a sense of Karen’s self-efficacy beliefs and to point
attention to it. While working on various academic tasks, I asked Karen to describe her
beliefs while performing tasks. The goal of questioning Karen about her beliefs and
prompting her to consider the role of them for performance was to encourage her to
internalize these techniques of self-efﬁcacy assessment.

Early in the research my efforts were geared towards helping Karen pay attention
to and monitor self-efficacy. As discussed in chapter four, I experienced difficulty with
these efforts. Understanding the importance of having appropriate levels of efﬁcacy for
SRL, I used strategies to both help Karen pay attention to her efﬁcacy but also to improve
her efficacy, which I found to be low (see chapter four). To help her pay attention to and
improve efﬁcacy I used modeling, reinforcement and verbal persuasion.

SRL researchers have identiﬁed modeling as a key strategy for supporting the

61

recognition, modeling and transformations in students’ self-efficacy beliefs (e.g., Schunk,
1994; Zimmerman, 1989). Teachers can act as models, or recruit other students to model
improvements in skill and knowledge acquisition. Such modeling, Schunk (1994)
argued, could increase students’ self-efﬁcacy for making improvements towards the
acquisition of skills and knowledge. While working with Karen at home, I illustrated
problem solving and metacognitive strategies by verbally expressing thoughts when
engaging with activities. For example, I thought aloud while reading a text to illustrate
how to monitor comprehension of the text and use different strategies to comprehend the
text. After doing the think aloud, we deliberated over the strategy to consider its
usefulness.

As Schunk argued, peer modeling could be a powerful force for impacting self-
efﬁcacy. As Zimmerman (1989) noted, students do not always seek out appropriate role
models, whether peers, teachers, parents or media symbols. Therefore, I worked with
Karen to consider appropriate role models and discuss what these role models do. For
this strategy, I was careful to not overstate social comparisons because it could have
competed with mastery orientation and could have been counterproductive for facilitating
SRL. An additional concern had to do with using social comparisons to create a
normalized subject. I did not want to position Karen as someone who needed to be like
somebody else.

Other ways I tried to promote productive levels of self-efﬁcacy was by using
verbal encouragement or verbal persuasion. This strategy was typically considered to be
less effective by itself (Zimmerman, 1989) and therefore, was accompanied by the

strategy of supporting successful completion of tasks perceived as moderately difﬁcult.

62

Schunk (1994) noted that students who exert some degree of effort, early successes
would presumably raise their self-efﬁcacy (Schunk, 1994).

Goal-setting and strategic planning were important components of self-efﬁcacy in
particular and SRL in general. As Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1996) noted, goal-
setting and strategic planning “occur when students analyze the learning task, set speciﬁc
learning goals, and plan or reﬁne the strategy to attain the goal” (p. 11). I asked Karen
about what she was thinking prior to task engagement and what her goals for completing
the task were before she began. The purpose was to see if, at all, Karen was strategizing
prior to task engagement. From the social cognitive perspective, the relation between
self-efﬁcacy and goals are key. If individuals have overly optimistic self-efficacy, then
their goals might be to spend less time on a task and pay less attention to accuracy.

Learning strategies were also part of the intervention. Strategies included
comprehension monitoring using self-questioning techniques, developing self-
assessments, task management and organizing information and time. I worked on
homework with Karen and assisted her with using appropriate learning strategies to
complete assignments. Depending on Karen’s needs, I adapted different strategies.
Karen’s responses to the intervention, the homework assignments and classroom practice
inﬂuenced the strategies for the intervention.

I continually monitored this intervention with Karen and her parents and teachers
in order to keep the Karen’s best interests paramount. Throughout the process, I asked
Karen about her experiences with the intervention. This questioning took place while

working on homework.

63

Analytical ﬁ'ameworks

I draw from expertise in self-regulated learning, and analyze data through three
complementary theoretical lenses: educational psychology, sociology, and continental
philosophy. I am not striving for theoretical coherence or the reconciliation between
these perspectives. Rather, what is needed is a strengthening of the theoretical
conceptualization of SRL in order to give researchers and practitioners’ more
differentiated understandings of SRL. By strengthening, I mean adding more nuance and
subtlety to the conceptual threads of SRL by expanding the ﬁameworks used to examine
SRL. In this section, I brieﬂy describe each framework while highlighting key
conceptual contributions to the study of SRL.

One of the reasons for choosing a sociological framework informed by Bourdieu
and continental philosophical framework informed by Foucault was that these
ﬁameworks have not been used to study SRL. Aside from the novelty of these two
perspectives for the study of SRL, I believed that conceptual contributions of these
particular frameworks could have provided a rich conversation to highlight multiple
angles of SRL. Moreover, I have found the works of Bourdieu and Foucault to be
particularly generative and intellectually interesting in my research and thinking about

educational psychology.

Social Cognitive Perspective
For this perspective, I drew mostly ﬁ'om the intervention’s framework to analyze

the data. The intervention was written from a social cognitive perspective. From this

perspective self-efﬁcacy is the key personal variable that affects SRL. From this

64

perspective, conventional codes associated with SRL were used to make sense of Karen
and her relationship to the intervention. These categories include metacognition,
cognition, learning strategy use, self-efficacy, help seeking and goal formation. These
conventional categories were organized using the social cognitive perspective.

Bandura’s (1989) social learning theory lays the foundations for many of the
ideas in the social cognitive view of SRL. An essential component of the social
cognitive view of SRL is reciprocal causation. From the perspective of reciprocal
causation, psychology, behavior and environment are all seen as discrete entities that
interact in bi—directional feedback loops. A key conclusion coming from this
framework is that individuals are both producers and products of their environments.
As Bandura (1989) explained, people produce their environments by exerting
behaviors in them. From this perspective, an environment is not a ﬁxed entity, and a
person is not a discrete entity. Rather, both the person and the environment embody -
potentialities. When an individual exerts a behavior, the environment takes form
through the relationship to the behavior, and the person takes form through the
relationship to the environment. Therefore, certain behaviors generate different
environments, and therefore, different environmental effects, which inﬂuences our
thoughts and beliefs.

When theorizing the environment this way it seems to follow that individuals are
viewed as having the capability and capacity to shape the environment and control the
outcomes of their lives. If behaviors give form to the environment, then control over the
environment becomes possible through the control over behavior. Bandura (1989) does

not 'view the relationship between behavior and environment as uni-directional. As the

65

model title suggests, there is a reciprocal relationship between behavior and the
environment. There are also reciprocal relationships between thoughts and behavior and
thoughts and environment. A foundational assumption undergirding this perspective is
that certain psychological conditions could alter other psychological conditions and
behavior. Psychological variables such as self-efﬁcacy and goal formation could lead to
a wide range of different behaviors that might shape the environment in different ways.
An important feature of the social cognitive approach to SRL is that the
environment does not passively shape individuals’ behaviors and thoughts. Rather,
individuals are thought to shape the environment and mediate the effects of
environmental feedback. In the contemporary formulation of SRL from the social
cognitive perspective, Zimmerman (2000) distinguished between two different
orientations to the environment: reactive and proactive. People who are reactive self-
regulators react to environmental stimuli and therefore are bound to the results of social
comparisons and external evaluations, which might be unfavorable. As Zimmerman
(2000) noted, the result of reactive self-regulation is a decline in intrinsic interest in
academic tasks, loss of self-efﬁcacy and lack of speciﬁc process goals (Zimmerman,
2000). Proactive means that the potentiality of the environment and personal power is
recognized and individuals shape the environment and themselves in ways that help them
achieve their goals. As Zimmerman noted, key mechanisms for proactivity are planning
and self-recording. The logic is that baseline information about oneself and strategic goal

setting generate a sense of personal agency needed for student progress.

Critical Postmodern Perspective

I borrowed the term “critical postmodern” ﬁom Martin (2006). Popkewitz (1999)
also used this label to distinguish critical modernism (e.g., work derived from Marxism
such as the Frankfurt School) ﬁom critical postmodernism (e. g., work derived ﬁom
French continental theory such as that of Michel Foucault). According to Martin, the
critical postmodern work of people such as Rose, Gergen, and Foucault count as another
brand of social cultural theorizing. In the new edition of Handbook of Educatiom
Pachology, Martin (2006) stated that social cultural theorizing can take three lines:
Vygotskian, Meadian, and critical postmodern. The commonalities Martin (2006) drew
across these three lines of social cultural theorizing involve incredulity towards progress
and the modernist construction of the individual. By making these connections, Martin
wrestles with those researchers who use social cultural perspectives only to make claims
about how the social environment impacts the individual rather than how the individual is
constituted in and by certain relationships.

Work that might be classiﬁed as critical postmodern varies considerably. So,
what does a critical postmodern perspective look like? The way I understand the critical
postmodern tradition is that there is no single way in which to see things. Also, there is
arguably not a singular methodology for conducting a critical postmodern analysis. From
a critical postmodern perspective, I set out to examine some of the taken-for-granted
assumptions of SRL and to consider multiple dimensions of SRL that have been ignored.

While I wanted to explore taken-for-granted assumptions and highlight features of
SRL that have been ignored, I relied on the work of Rose (1996), Foucault (2007) and

Cruikshank (1999) to inform this exploration. Each author’s work provided different

67

conceptual tools to analyze different features of the data. While there is variability in
their objects of study, I found their work to converge in regards to their analyses of the
employment of different technologies used to produce self-governing individuals. I
brieﬂy discuss features of each author’s work that was inﬂuential in my analysis.

I borrowed some of the conceptual work from Cnrikshank (1999), who alluded to
ideas of dis/empowerment by studying the technologies of citizenship. These
technologies fell under the rubric of, what she titled, playing off Nietzsche, “the will to
empower.” The will to empower involves mobilizing various sorts of technologies to
“empower” subjects for the purpose of solving political and social problems. As
Cruikshank argued, empowerment carried with it constraints and subjection.
Empowerment, according to Cruikshank, was not autonomy from power but another form
of government, only to be conducted by oneself with the help of experts. Cruikshank
suggested that the will to empower positions those individuals that need to be
“empowered” as deﬁcient and the cause and cure for social and political problems.
Cruikshank gave me a framework for understanding the multiple dimensions of
empowerment and the will to empower.

Similar to Cruikshank, Dean (1999), a philosopher of education who writes in a
critical postmodern tradition, pOinted out that empowerment programs are a shifting form
of government. He stated, “Programmes of empowerment are particularly clear examples
of those contemporary liberal rationalities of government that endeavor to operationalize
the self-goveming capacities of the governed in the pursuit of governmental objectives”

. (Dean, 1999, p. 67). I

From Rose’s (1996) work, I draw the notions of calculation and documentation.

68

He discussed these notions in the context of behavioral therapies of the 19505.
According to Rose (1996), during that time social ailments were believed to have been
solved by contingency management. Such management was no longer administered by
the therapist, social worker or the teacher but was to become part of systematic
management of one’s own behavior leading to better social adaptation. Rose noted that
the new ﬁeld of application was called self-control. He argued that psychotherapists
reasoned that such self-control mechanisms have a humanistic end. He stated “. ..while
many associate behavior techniques with manipulation and control, their practitioners
stress their potential for enhancing skills of ‘self management’ and helping clients gain
control of their feelings and behavior; they see them as consonant with profound
humanistic values” (p. 230). Calculation and documentation were two techniques used to
support greater self-control.

While Rose (1996) did not dispute freedom associated with the achieving self-
control by calculating and documenting truths about the self, he argued that this freedom
has another side to it. By following advice from experts on how to self-inspect and self-
reforrn, individuals become entangled in normalizing and individualizing practices. It is
individualizing because techniques are used to construct an identity, one in which Rose
argued individuals become obligated to construct. It is normalizing because there is often
a generalized and homogenized construction on how to live coming from experts. '

Calculation and documentation are not only intended to develop truths about
selves, rely on the ability to tell the truth about the self in order to make calculation and
documentation useful. From Foucault, I use the notion of truth therapy (which I discuss

more in chapter six) and consider some of parallels between Foucault’s study of truth

69

 

 

therapies and SRL. What this framework has allowed me to do was consider the ways
SRL can realize the promises of human empowerment and at the same time require
disciplined and normalized forms of engagement mediated by experts on how to live.
When viewed this way, I was able to consider the ways SRL was simultaneously

empowering and disempowering.

Habitus and Cultural Capital: Bourdieu

From this perspective, I draw from the work of Bourdieu (1977/2004) and Lareau
1989/2000; 2003). In particular, I use the notions of habitus and cultural capital to
consider the connection between SRL and different class habitus. Prior to this research, I
did not recognize the potential correlation between SRL and class habitus. This
connection emerged in the analysis. To organize the data from this perspective, I allowed
certain codes to emerge from the data. After some consideration, I noticed patterns that
were similar to Lareau’s work and eventually adopted a coding scheme informed by her
work. Below is a discussion the deﬁnition of habitus and allusion to its usefulness as an
interpretative tool.

There are many components to the notion of habitus. Before going into those
components, it is important to understand the role of habitus in Bourdieu’s work. In
order to avoid objectivisrn and subj ectivism, and mechanism and ﬁnalism, Bourdieu used
the notion of habitus to explain the negotiation of practice within objective structures.
According to Bourdieu, human thought and behavior could not be understood by
considering only the material conditions, nor could they be understood as cognitive and

motivational structures independent of cultural inscriptions.

70

Bourdieu described the habitus as the “durably installed generative principle of
regulated improvisations” (p. 78). Additionally, he stated that the habitus is

transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to ﬁmction as

structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of

practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’
without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to
their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery
of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively
orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”

(p. 72)

From this description, one of the more important concepts for understanding habitus is
disposition.

In a footnote, Bourdieu (1977/2004) stated that the notion of disposition is well
suited to understand habitus. In that footnote, be deﬁned disposition as “the result of an
organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words such as structure; it also
designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and, in particular, a
predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination” (p. 214). Although the translator
noted that the French use of disposition has a wider semantic cluster, he found that
Bourdieu’s description of disposition matches an English use’. From Bourdieu’s
description, I understand dispositions to be those cognitive and motivational structures
that resulted from action and interaction in and through objective structures. These

structures then become the impetus for future practices and the determination of objective

 

' The translator’s comments could be found directly following Bourdieu’s deﬁnition of
disposition, which is found on page 214.

71

potentialities. That is, dispositions inﬂuence the ﬁeld of operation and the position taken
in this ﬁeld.

Perhaps Bourdieu’s notion of disposition resonates with some English uses of the
term. However, in some research literature, such as personality and education, the notion
of disposition diverges from Bourdieu. For example, Katz (1993) conceptualized
dispositions as habits of mind or tendencies to respond to certain situations in a certain
way. Stanovich (1999) deﬁned dispositions as “relatively stable psychological
mechanisms and strategies that tend to generate characteristic behavioral tendencies and
tactics” (p. 157). Some research on dispositions has correlated particular dispositions
with particular kinds of behaviors. For example, evidence has been reported that
dispositions such as engaging a task in an “open-minded” fashion and weighing evidence
against personal beliefs accounted for differences in problem solving performance
(Kardash & Sinatra, 2003).

For physical objects dispositional properties can be talked about differently.
Disposition can be thought of as a property in which the thing that has the property would
change or bring about some change under certain conditions. For instance, to say that an
object is elastic is to say that under certain conditions that object can stretch. A
disposition of an object means that under certain conditions that object would change or
bring about some change. There can be a high level of predictability to how much an
object can be stretched given a consideration of the physical properties of the object and
the amount of force used. Such controls and measurements are fundamental for scientiﬁc
inquiry.

The way Bourdieu talks about habitus leads me to believe that he thinks about

72

dispositions differently from researchers in the United States. For one, the habitus
produces the ﬁeld of operations and structures the participation within that ﬁeld. Second,
habitus is not something that manifests under certain environmental conditions. It is the
movements of the body, sensations, tastes, skills and ways of thinking that are part of and
shape everyday practices. The interesting thing about habitus is that Bourdieu argued
that there is a degree of homogeneity in habitus for those in a certain economic stratum.

Such homogeneity is understood to be a result of similarities in material conditions.

Conclusion

My research question for the dissertation was: how could using multiple
perspectives illuminate some of the complexities of SRL as they related to the lived
experience of one student? I conducted an in-depth analysis of SRL by working with an
upper elementary student who had been having academic difﬁculty. I implemented an
intervention designed to support the development of SRL while improving academic
performance. I worked with Karen for nearly 5 months on completing class and
homework assignments. I analyzed the data from three theoretical perspectives:
psychological, sociological and philosophical. My goal was to be in a position to
consider SRL in a deep and nuanced way and not make universalizing claims about the
utility of the intervention or SRL in general. As noted early in this chapter, on modernist
epistemological plain a sample of one does not make sense for generalizability. On a
postmodern epistemological plain, a sample of one is different: it broadens understanding
by inviting different kinds of reading and disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions. My
goal for the dissertation was to support Karen’s academic success and to push researchers

and teachers to expand their repertoires for understanding SRL.

73

Chapter 4
Analysis from the Social Cognitive Perspective

In this chapter, I analyze my data using the social cognitive perspective. This
chapter is the ﬁrst of three perspectives that I use to consider the data. Because the
intervention was informed by social cognitive theory, the analysis in this chapter involves
both an examination of some of the complexities involved with the social cognitive
treatment of self-regulated learning (SRL) and a consideration of what the social
cognitive perspective allowed me to see. I focus on the notions of agency and self-
efﬁcacy, which are two related notions that are at the foundation of a social cognitive
view of SRL. The social cognitive treatment of SRL is distinctive with its emphasis on
agentic capabilities, which individuals could learn to harness in order to effect their
learning. From the social cognitive perspective, self-efficacy is a key psychological
condition connected to agentic capabilities, a relationship I make clearer in the upcoming
chapter. In this chapter, I consider Karen’s self-efficacy and obstacles for fostering levels
of efficacy necessary for SRL.

I argue that from the social cognitive perspective Karen needed to have certain
psychological conditions (e.g. self-efficacy) and skills (e.g. evaluation and monitoring) to
be more effective at SRL. Connected to this perspective I made a few observations about

Karen. She:

hi
0

improperly perceived her agentic capabilities
2. had unrealistic perceptions of her beliefs and outcomes
3. had a conﬂicting goal structure

4. lacked the executive skills to monitor and control her thoughts, behaviors and

74

the environment
5. struggled with using and evaluating learning strategies
I argue that Karen did not have the necessary psychological conditions or skills to
regulate her learning effectively and fostering the necessary psychological conditions and
skills added additional learning burdens when Karen needed more support. Working to
harness agentic capabilities seemed to take time and effort, two commitments with which

Karen struggled.

Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective

As I have mentioned in the literature review, the social cognitive treatment of
SRL has been described as being epistemologically aligned with constructivism (Martin,
2004b), despite Bandura’s effort to merge, what we see today as, constructivist and
sociocultural epistemologies. The association with the social cognitive view of SRL and
constructivism made sense to me, even when considering Bandura’s original work.
According to Bandura (2001), individuals were both producers and products of their
environments. In the conceptualization, the reciprocal relationship between individual
intentionality and social interdependency were acknowledged. While this relationship
was acknowledged, Bandura emphasized the capacity for individuals to control behavior
and the environment by having certain psychological tools (e.g., forethought self-
evaluation) and psychological conditions (e.g., high self-efﬁcacy).

Bandura (2001) noted that the exercise of control through the production of
identities and environments, an exercise of human agency, occrn's as a result of

intentionality, forethought, self-regulation, self-reactive inﬂuence, and self-reﬂectiveness

75

about one's capabilities, quality of functioning, and the meaning and purpose of one's life
pursuits. F orethought, self-reaction, reﬂection about capabilities and goals are all key
mechanisms of the social cognitive view of SRL. Bandura (2001) wrote, “The capacity
to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life is the essence of humanness
(p. 1).

It seems that the notion “capacity” in relation to “essence of humanness” signiﬁes
a universal and innate human quality. Also, it seems that the term “capacity” signiﬁes
exclusion. That is, I take that term to mean that all people have the “capacity” to
“exercise control” but only some harness that capacity and others fail to harness it. Thus,
from this perspective learning to exercise agency was something that could be developed.
According to social cognitive researchers, self-efﬁcacy is a key feature of exercising
agency. Self-efﬁcacy is deﬁned as the belief in the ability to complete certain tasks and
effect life outcomes. It is important to make clear the relationship between SRL, agency
and self-efﬁcacy. Before I delve into that relationship, I want to highlight that from the
social cognitive perspective beliefs play a key role in self-regulation and harnessing
agentic capabilities.

As stated in the literature review, Zimmerman (2000) suggested that self-efﬁcacy
goes hand in hand with perceptions of agency. The logic is that the perception of
capabilities to produce desired outcomes is key for intentional, strategic and proactive
self-regulation. If individuals did not believe they had the capability to do certain things,
there would be little motivation to act. Researchers and theorists who draw from the
social cognitive perspective to inform their understanding of SRL treat personal

perceptions, in particular self-efﬁcacy, as the variable that affects control over behaviors,

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the environment and oneself (Bandura, 2001; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1997; Zimmerman,
Bonner & Kovach, 1996). The feature of the social cognitive theory that makes it an
interesting agentic perspective is the emphasis on beliefs as the mechanism to steer one’s
behavior to pursue goals. While beliefs are not the only mechanism needed, they are a
key source of personal agency.

From the social cognitive perspective, individuals who are efﬁcacious are people
who exercise their will: shape their own behavior, thoughts and environment (Bandura,
1997). Those efﬁcacious people are those who are more likely to engage in the cycle of
regulation (Zimmerman, et al., 1996). Some individuals might not be aware of their self-
efﬁcacy and the relationship to behaviors and outcomes. Or individuals might be aware
of their self-efﬁcacy but their self-efficacy beliefs might have, at best, a loose connection
to outcomes. Therefore, evaluation and monitoring self-efﬁcacy and its relationship to
performance outcomes is a key psychological skill for SRL.

Being deliberate about fostering self—efﬁcacy and the evaluation and monitoring
of it was an important overall goal of the intervention. From my work with Karen, I
observed that realizing her agentic-capabilities by evaluating and monitoring her self-
efﬁcacy was difﬁcult. There were many obstacles to evaluating and monitoring self-
efﬁcacy, forming the association between beliefs and outcomes, and understanding the
role beliefs play in outcomes. There are many explanations for Karen’s difficulty. I will
try as earnestly as possible to consider these explanations from a social cognitive
perspective. I try to do this without necessarily identifying the problem with SRL. At the
same time, I want to acknowledge some of the complexities associated with the

application of SRL by considering some of the messiness associated with it.

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Understanding Self-efﬁcacy and Self-Regulated Learning

As I noted earlier, researchers drawing from social cognitive theory emphasize the
importance of self-efﬁcacy for SRL. Individuals who are efﬁcacious are people who
exercise their will: shape their own behavior, thoughts and environment. Those
efﬁcacious people are those who are more likely to engage in the cycle of regulation.
Some individuals are not in tuned with their self-efﬁcacy and therefore must start to
regulate by evaluating and monitoring their efficacy. Those individuals who are not
efficacious could learn to be so by evaluating and monitoring their self-efﬁcacy, learning
strategies, goals and outcomes associated with them. Individuals could learn to be
efﬁcacious through self-monitoring, verbal persuasion, the experience of success and
exposure to successful models.

In this section, I present a portrait of Karen that helps to consider the difﬁculty
Karen had with becoming efﬁcacious. Infused in this portrait are analyses and some
methodological rationales. One of purposes of this next section is to get a general sense
of Karen’s approach to learning and its impact on self-efﬁcacy. Another purpose is to
consider the cognitive demands associated with the promotion of efﬁcacy. I never
stopped learning about Karen, and so I will include data about Karen that spans the entire
research period. First, I discuss her sense of self-efﬁcacy, which I found to be
inconsistent with her performance outcomes. Then I discuss the notion of help seeking
and its role in the development of efﬁcacy. Third, I discuss Karen’s goals and describe
how that contributed to her difﬁcultly with becoming efﬁcacious. Fourth, I describe

Karen’s learning strategies and include observations about her metacognitive awareness.

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Self-efﬁcacy and Performance Outcomes

During the ﬁrst interview with Karen, I selected items from the Motivated
Strategies Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) (Appendix A), which is a Likert scale, to
assess, among other things, her sense of self-efficacy. Some of the items pertaining to
self-efﬁcacy gauged Karen’s overall beliefs about her ability to learn in school and her
self-efﬁcacy to employ effective learning strategies when needed. While Karen “slightly
agreed” that she might not receive good grades and employ effective study strategies
when learning, she “strongly agreed” that she had the ability to learn all subjects. The
MSLQ is not subject speciﬁc, so I further elaborated on those items by gauging her
beliefs about her ability to perform in each of her different school subject areas. Her
sense of self-efﬁcacy to learn math was rated a little lower (but still optimistic if
considering her math performance) than the other subjects; it. received a ﬁve out of seven
rating.2 Ratings for all other subject areas received a six or seven rating.

With Karen, there was a discrepancy between her performance and what she
believed she could do. From my investigation into Karen’s academic performance, I
noticed that she had a history of poor performance in those subjects she believed she had

the ability in which to perform well. Not only observing past report cards, when I

 

2 I understand that there are limitations to self-report data: individuals could interpret questions
differently, might answer questions based on self-preservation or could be considered delusional.
While the MSLQ has been shown to be valid and reliable, I triangulated the data using
observations and interviews to assess the relationship between what Karen did and what she

believed.

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worked with Karen I noticed many academic struggles with engagement and performance
with most of the homework tasks. In addition to our interaction and past reports cards,
performance on standardized test scores and reports from teachers were further evidence
that Karen was struggling in many academic areas.

According to Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1996), if outcomes and beliefs
about ability to perform did not match, then potential problems could have ensued.
According to the authors of the intervention, increasing or improving SRL must be
precipitated by realistic representations—neither too low nor too high—of self-efﬁcacy.
As Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1994) noted, “Pessimism can lead to poor
motivation, and over-optimism can lead to insufficient preparation” (p. 30). Arguably,
individuals could be efﬁcacious but believe that because a teacher does not like them,
they expect to perform might perform poorly; hence, the distinction between self-efﬁcacy
and expectancy outcomes. Or there might be other issues involved that the individual
might see as affecting outcomes. From the social cognitive perspective, it could be
argued that those individuals who surrender to external determinants of outcomes are not
efﬁcacious enough to mobilize personal and social resources to inﬂuence external
variables.

While an alignment may or may not be always be necessary, I believed that it was
important for Karen to have it. For one, it was important for the intervention. Also, she
had a history of academic struggles (since the second grade). Therefore, to attribute these
struggles to external determinants while preserving a sense of efﬁcacy could conﬂict with
the realization that Karen could affect learning outcomes. There is evidence to suggest

that Karen visualized failure and, therefore, avoided tasks. Wanting to preserve her self-

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esteem or self-worth, it was possible that Karen continued to perceive herself as having
the ability to perform speciﬁc tasks in speciﬁc subject areas. Regardless of why there
was a discrepancy between efﬁcacy and outcomes, there was a discrepancy.

While Karen reported a high sense of self-efﬁcacy to perform tasks in school
subjects, observations led me to conclude that her perception of her self-efficacy might
have been lower than what she reported. I relied on observation data to inform my
understanding of Karen’s self-efﬁcacy. I paid attention to Karen’s goals and her
persistence as indicators of self-efﬁcacy because, as Bandura (2001) noted, efﬁcacious
people persist with challenging tasks and set appropriate goals to master those
challenging tasks. As I discuss later, Karen’s persistence was questionable and her goals
were seldom mastery. Karen displayed reluctance to begin tasks, refused to work on
tasks independently, experienced frustration when engaging in tasks and avoided
challenging tasks. According to Bandura (1994), people with high assurance in their
capabilities approach difﬁcult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to
be avoided. It is argued that such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest, deep
engrossment in activities and the setting and maintaining of challenging goals (Bandura,
1994). From working with Karen, I did not observe an approach to difficult tasks as
challenges to be mastered or deep engrossment. Her approach seemed to reﬂect more of
a way to avoid challenges.

There were two possibilities that I have considered thus far: 1) there was a
discrepancy between self-reported efﬁcacy and outcomes 2) there was not discrepancy
because Karen’s efﬁcacy was lower than what she reported. To support the ﬁrst

possibility, it could be argued that Karen had the efﬁcacy but was lacking the behavioral

81

skill and appropriate goals for SRL. From my work with Karen, I interpreted her as
having low self-efﬁcacy, poor behavioral skill and a set of goals that competed with
mastery learning. Efﬁcacy, behavior and goals are all related. From the social cognitive
perspective, being efﬁcacious could inﬂuence goal pursuits and behavioral skill. Karen
ﬁrst had to realize the role beliefs, doubts and fears played in academic performance.
She was expected to achieve this by monitoring and evaluating her self-efﬁcacy and its
relationship to behaviors, goals and performance outcomes.

While it was important for me to discern the features of Karen’s academic
functioning, it was a key goal of the intervention to support the development of her
evaluation and monitoring of her functioning. It was expected that Karen get in touch
with her beliefs and their relationship to outcomes (see chapter three).

The authors of the intervention suggested that quizzes and homework should be
used as an “objective” measure to achieve monitor and evaluate self-efﬁcacy and
achieve, as they suggest, “slightly optimistic,” self-efﬁcacy ratings (pp. 27-29). The
formula suggested by the authors to measure and monitor self-efﬁcacy to achieve this
alignment is described in detail in chapter three. The proposed formula from the
intervention would have helped generate the data to create a visual representation of self-
efﬁcacy and its changes. Using this to support the calculation of Karen’s sense of self-
efﬁcacy was difﬁcult for a number of reasons. First, Karen had a difﬁcult time predicting
the number of homework problems she would get right. That is, when I asked her to tell
me how many. problems she would get correct, she often responded, “I don’t know.”
This response was common for Karen, especially when it pertained to discussing her

beliefs, predictions, thinking and goals.

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It is important to mention that this formula would have only worked for her rrrath
homework because it had a clear and predetermined set of problems that she was required
to complete. I tried to use this strategy for other subject area homework but it required
that I generate quizzes, something with a set number of questions on which she could
have predicted possible correct responses. The two times I generated quizzes, early in the
intervention, Karen refused to take them. In addition, she would not make predictions
about how many she might get correct. Throughout the intervention, Karen refused to
work on anything related to school that was not assigned by the teacher. In part, the time
and cognitive effort required for these tasks was probably reason for resistance. Before
introducing this component, we were already spending at least two hours a night on
homework that her teacher stated should have taken 50 minutes. From the beginning of
the intervention, Karen already expressed resistance to academic tasks by sitting quietly
and staring downwards for sometimes 10-15 minutes. Pertaining to her disability, the
special education teacher noted that resistance to academic tasks was common for
individuals with central auditory processing disability because tasks would seem too
overwhelming to begin.

This more formal, documented and graphed approach to aligning performance
outcomes and perceptions of self—efficacy was difﬁcult. For the measurement, evaluation
and monitoring efﬁcacy to have worked the way it was supposed to, Karen needed to
write more (something Karen typically did not like to do), spend additional time on tasks
and learn to evaluate tasks and predict her performance. These requirements added
additional temporal and cognitive demands to tasks, ones Karen rejected. According to

the intervention, discerning this relationship was supposed to be made possible by

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participating in extracurricular activities, ones that, as Karen viewed it, would not satisfy
any academic requirement. From the social cognitive perspective, Karen’s struggles
could be construed as a personal unwillingness to work towards becoming a better
learner.

Supporting the immediate and consistent evaluation of self-efficacy was
unsuccessful. While I did not abandon the goal to produce awareness and monitoring of
self-efﬁcacy, I shifted the approach. I still continued to assess her self-efﬁcacy
throughout the intervention and help her pay attention to those beliefs (see chapter three).
To assess her self-efﬁcacy beliefs, I relied mostly on observational data because
questions pertaining directly to her beliefs about self-efﬁcacy were answered with “I
don’t know” or a shrug of the shoulders.

While we consistently talked about her beliefs, there was little evidence that
Karen was evaluating and monitoring her efﬁcacy during her homework. Towards the
end of the research period, I observed that Karen showed commitment, persistence and
interest for writing her magazine article. Potentially associated with efﬁcacy, there was
still little evidence to suggest that Karen both associated beliefs with outcomes and
monitored and evaluated her efﬁcacy. I administered the same MSLQ items at the end of
the intervention period and Karen’s ratings of efﬁcacy for performing in speciﬁc subjects
were nearly the same from the ﬁrst time I administered these items. As compared to the
report card at the beginning of the research period, there were slight improvements in her
ﬁnal report card. Even though her grades were nearly the same and her efﬁcacy ratings
were nearly the same, Karen’s academic performance improved. Her teacher

acknowledged this improvement.

Help Seeking: Learned Helplessness in Relationship to Self-Regulated Learning

A feature of the social cognitive perspective of agency is the role of the social
context. Bandura (2001) discussed the notion of proxy agency, which involves using 7
others to achieve personal goals. Bandura acknowledged that individuals could not
control every part of a social context and therefore, must be able to use others for the
purpose of achieving personal goals. In schools, proxy agency could be discussed with
the notion of help seeking, which has been identiﬁed as a key SRL mechanism. Karen’s
help seeking patterns helps to reveal information about her self-efﬁcacy and illustrates
competition with efﬁcacy development. As Bandura (2001) noted, proxy agency could
get in the way of promoting personal competencies. In this section I discuss Karen’s help
seeking patterns and consider them in relation to self-efﬁcacy.

Karen would often ask where to write things, and she would often ask how to
begin a task. Karen would seldom initiate task engagement. Karen would often pause in
the middle of a task and ask questions such as, “is this right,” “is this where it belongs,”
and “is this how I should write it.” The question with which I struggled is when do the
proclivities to ask these questions count as dependency or learned helplessness, and when
do these questions count as strategic help-seeking that is important for self-regulation?
When working with Karen, I had a difﬁcult time distinguishing between, for example,
concepts such as strategic help seeking and learned helplessness.

It was important to make these conceptual distinctions because of the different
value placed on each form of engagement. For example, strategic help seeking has been

identiﬁed as an important part of SRL (Azevedo, Moos, Greene et a., 2008) but

85

dependency and learned helplessness seem to conﬂict with SRL. Learned helplessness
might be construed as dysfunctional perceptions of agency. In relation speciﬁcally to
struggling readers, which is a characterization that matches Karen, Vacca and Vacca
(2008) explain:

Learned helplessness. . .refers to students’ perceptions of themselves as being

unable to overcome failure. They usually sabotage their efforts to read by

believing that they can’t succeed at tasks that require literate behavior. Their
I struggles with literacy tasks result from a lack of knowledge of and control over

the strategic routines needed to engage in meaningful transactions with texts. (p.

38)

The logic of learned helplessness is that there are no direct external constraints for certain
behaviors, only that individuals’ beliefs about what is possible shapes behavioral
possibilities. From a social cognitive perspective, and as alluded to in the quotation
above, inactivity at times when action is apparently possible results from incorrect
perceptions of self-efﬁcacy.

Not unrelated to learned helplessness, dependency could be seen as the desire to
exert the least amount of effort while pursuing the “accurate” completion of a task. For
some teachers, help seeking could be seen as a kind of dependence to circumvent
thoughtful engagement in the task. Mrs. Jones valued student help seeking only if
students evaluated what they knew and did not know and then used her to support the
acquisition of the knowledge that they did not know. Amongst other forms of executive
functioning, it is suggested from this position that students (good, self-regulated learners)

could have insight into what they did not know and use resources to support knowledge

86

acquisition. This treatment of help seeking is aligned with the notion of proxy agency.
This conceptualization of the student, which Mrs. Jones described as the good student,
matches conceptualizations of self-regulated learners. From Mrs. Jones’ perspective,
help seeking counted as such, and not dependency or learned helplessness, when it was
strategic, intentional and oriented towards knowledge acquisition.

Were Karen’s questions or attempts to garner academic support strategic,
intentional and in support of ﬁlling in the gaps in her knowledge? Or were her questions
expressions of learned helplessness or dependency? Before considering responses to
these questions, it is important to consider more evidence pertaining to Karen’s “help-
seeking.” During homework, Karen relied almost exclusively on me for task initiation
and task completion for math and social studies. For her language arts homework, which
was usually much shorter and required little reading, Karen typically initiated and
sometimes completed it without my support. There were also a number of instances
when Karen needed support to complete her language arts homework. For extended
assignments (ones that typically took multiple days to complete), such as the magazine
article, book report and fantasy short story, Karen seldom worked on them without my
assistance.

There were many instances in which Karen immediately asked questions and I
withheld direct responses and scaffolded supports because I wanted her to develop the
skills, knowledge and disposition to assess tasks and employ and evaluate strategies. The
transcript below described a common occurrence, especially in the early part of the
intervention, whereby Karen was engaging with an insert of a book. I brought Karen to

the library to select a book for her fantasy book report and I gave her the opportunity to

87

choose her book. I explained the assignment to the librarian because Karen refused to do
it. The librarian took Karen to a section in the library and gave her ﬁve books from
which to choose. Karen immediately wanted me to tell her which book to choose. I
responded by encouraging her to read the inserts and the descriptions on the back covers
to help her make a decision. I viewed Karen’s initial help seeking as conﬂicting with
SRL. It was important that she assess the merit, degree of difﬁculty, and level of interest.

At one point after perusing the books, Kareniwas trying to read the insert of the
book Mﬁyeﬂestjng. After reading the ﬁrst paragraph of the insert, she pointed to it
and asked me:

Km: What does this [pointing to the entire paragraph] mean?

Stephen: What do you think it means?

Keren: I don’t know.

Stephep: What did you do to try to understand?

Karen: I don’t know.

Stephen: Try reading it again and tell me what you did to understand and what

you think it means.

Karen had a difﬁcult time understanding the description of the book. I engaged her with
some leading questions and withheld any direct explanation of the contents of the book.
Showing clear signs of confusion and misunderstanding of the text in the insert, I
expected her to enact strategies and reﬂect on and evaluate them.

When Karen asked for help trying to discern the meaning of the insert, 1 prompted
her to engage with the text. Upon reﬂection, it seemed I prompted her because of the

difference in kinds of help seeking and their implications. If I viewed Karen inquiries as

88

help seeking that was part of SRL, then it would have made sense to support her inquiry
by responding directly to her question. If viewed as dependency or learned helplessness,
then her approach needed to be altered. I responded to her efforts for support by
redirecting questions back to her, pushing her to make more strategic and intentional
deliberations over the text. My questions required her to have, be able to use, reﬂect on
and verbally communicate strategy-use.

Similar to the transcript above, I would often ask her about her thinking during an
academic task. Almost always, Karen would respond, “I don’t know.” Part of the logic
of giving Karen opportunities to work independently and asking her questions about
strategy use was to support strategy activation so that she could monitor and evaluate
certain strategies for their utility for certain tasks. Again, the logic underlying this
approach is that Karen could learn academic self-regulation by employing strategies and
then evaluating them. Also, she had to recognize the current quality of her thoughts and
strategies in order to regulate learning. Anyway, I interpreted much of Karen’s help
seeking as learned helplessness and dependency because she illustrated little evidence of
forethought, reﬂection and planning when beginning a task.

After I suggested reading the insert again, Karen stared at the text for a few
moments and then decided to take the book IueLEyeﬂestjng. To me, it did not seem like
she read the paragraph again. I realized that there might have been an issue with the book
selection, so I tried additional ways to engage Karen with the inserted text and the choice
of the book. At that point, she refused and wanted to leave the library. Karen seemed a
bit frustrated. After speaking with Karen’s teacher, she notiﬁed me that the book she

selected was at a 5’”-6"’ grade reading level; Karen was reading at a 4"I grade level.

89

For the next week, Karen was reading a book 1-2 grade levels higher than her
tested reading level and was expected to write a report identifying, among other things,
the plot, moral of the story and six key events for understanding the story. She worked
hard to complete the assignment and she had two weeks fewer than the rest of the class.
So not only did the experience of selecting a book cause Karen some frustration, the
assignment, which we worked on every night for four days, caused us to work harder and
have longer than two-hour sessions. Karen experienced more frustration and fatigue
during this particular week as compared to other weeks. The way she expressed her
fatigue and frustration was with body language, silence and resistance to activities.

As per the intervention, I operated on the idea that Karen would increase self-
efficacy by independently using learning strategies; I wanted to give her opportunities to
control and have choice about what strategies to use. Also, it was instrumental for the
intervention that Karen initiated tasks independently so she could reﬂect on and evaluate
her learning strategies. With that piece and the differentiation of different kinds of help
seeking, Karen was obligated to take control and make choices that ultimately caused
more frustration and potentially reinforced a work-avoidance orientation, the topic for the

next section.

Self-efﬁcacy and Goal Setting

In the discussion about self-efﬁcacy,l argued that there was a discrepancy
between Karen’s responses on the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire
(MSLQ) and her performance outcomes. That is, Karen reported being capable of

performing well in all schools subjects yet struggled with many tasks for each subject. I

90

did not just rely on grades and teacher and parent reports to determine that she was
struggling. I also considered observations made during the research period. I observed
that Karen had difﬁculty starting tasks, completing tasks, accuracy, speed and
comprehension. In this section, I consider the way goals might have contributed to
academic performance, self-efﬁcacy and overall academic struggles.

From the social cognitive perspective, goals are an important feature of SRL. It was
important that Karen set learning goals that could support the successful completion of
academic tasks. It was also important to monitor, evaluate and adjusts goals in order to
meet task demands.

As noted in the literature review, there is a distinction made between goal
orientation, on the one hand, and proximal and distal goal setting, on the other hand.
Pintrich (2000) described the former as “an individual’s general orientation (or schema or
theory) for approaching the task, doing the task, and evaluating their performance on the
task” (p. 473). While the synonym for orientation goal is purpose goal (Pintrich, 2000),
the latter label seems to have a more mutable connotation than Pintrich’s description
suggests. The words “general orientaﬁon” and “schema” connote an overarching
tendency that seems to take the form of a foundational principle for engaging in a task.
Proximal and distal goal setting are those smaller and larger tasks we set for ourselves
everyday, often in service of the orientation.

' A mastery orientation has been correlated with successful SRL (Greene &
Azevedo 2007 ). Performance approach orientations have been shown to correlate, not as
strongly as mastery, with successful SRL only if it were an approach orientation. From

my interactions with Karen’s parents and teachers, I noticed that they characterized

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Karen as having a work avoidance orientation. While they did not use the language of
work-avoidance, they described Karen as unmotivated and stubborn student who
stubbomly sat quietly in order to avoid doing her work. Laura stated that Karen just did
not want to do the work. Laura believed that Karen could do all the work if she just
dedicated more effort. These statements led me to believe that Laura viewed Karen as
having a work-avoidance orientation. Additionally, when I had Karen’s homework load
reduced, Laura expressed concern that Karen would take advantage. Laura was
suggesting that Karen would use the reduction to avoid having to do her work. This
interpretation made some sense to me. It did not seem- like Karen wanted to exert effort
on challenging tasks and often sat quietly for several rrrinutes at a time when it was time
to read, answer questions for social studies, write (before integration of technology and
even sometimes during).

Like the parents, Mrs. Jones stated that Karen was unmotivated and cared little
about school. She stated Karen often wanted to do as little work as possible. Instead of
attributing her orientation solely to an intentional willingness to do avoid work, Mrs.
Jones attributed Karen’s orientation to the parents. She believed that Karen’s parents
cared little about Karen’s academic success and shaped Karen’s orientation. Mrs. Jones
characterizations fell in line with a work-avoidance orientation, but identiﬁed parent
involvement and care as a mechanism to change her orientation.

1 could understand why her parents and teacher would have perceived Karen as
having exhibiting a work avoidance orientation. During a few instances when we cut her
math homework sheets in half, Karen displayed much more motivation. Towards the end

of the intervention when I took on more of the learning burden, she was much more eager

to work. The reduction of work produced more motivation to get the existing work done.
Also, losing worksheets, something Karen periodically did, could be interpreted as a way
to avoid work. Sitting quietly for several minutes instead of starting work could be seen
as work avoidance. Not completing in-class worksheets, which was common for Karen,
could be viewed as avoiding work. Karen did not avoid all tasks, however. Mainly she
avoided those tasks that were more challenging and required more effort.

I could see why teachers and parents conceptualized Karen’s orientation as work
avoidance and I can see why Karen avoided work. While working with me, Karen cried
at least six times during homework sessions. Her crying was not a new phenomenon,
though the tasks I assigned were probably responsible for an increase in its frequency.
She had difﬁculty completing her language arts homework, starting her math homework
and understanding her social studies readings. Despite all the hard work she exerted on
some of the assignments, she was not getting the grades she felt she deserved. Working
for at least two hours each night with these frustrations might have contributed to a work-
avoidance orientation. With this in mind, if work avoidance was her orientation, there
was a good reason for her to avoid the work: it was frustrating, unrewarding and time
consuming.

A work avoidance orientation does not work well with SRL. A goal of the
intervention was to support a mastery orientation. The way to support that orientation
was to promote high self-efﬁcacy. According to Bandura (2001), efﬁcacious people
persist with difﬁcult tasks and see those tasks as challenges to be mastered. Such a
position directly connects self-efﬁcacy to goal orientation. In particular, it is suggested

that there is a relationship between high self-efﬁcacy and mastery orientation, especially

93

when faced with challenging tasks. Considering Bandura’s (2001) connection between
efﬁcacy and mastery, it seems orientation does not have a universal connotation but is
task speciﬁc. From the social cognitive perspective, to promote mastery with tasks and
increase volition to persist with challenging tasks occurs with the increase in self-
efﬁcacy.

Proximal and distal goals play a key role in self-regulation. Karen listed a set of
goals, which were all related to completing her homework. Before I list the goals, I want
to note that 1 made many attempts to have Karen record or state her goals for school
learning in general, and for her homework in particular. Early in the intervention during
some homework sessions, I asked Karen to record her learning goals in a journal and
orally articulate them. Initial attempts requesting that Karen articulate her learning goals
were unsuccessful. After three days of asking, she eventually articulated a set of goals
for completing her homework. These goals were repeated throughout the research
period.

1. To ﬁnish

2. To ﬁnish quickly

3. To get it right

4. Not get frustrated
These goals could be described as a set of distal goals that have some alignment with a
work avoidance orientation. While I viewed some internal coherence of Karen’s goal
structure, there are clues to the complexity of the relationship between her goal
orientation and distal goals. The list of distal goals in itself was complex and -

contradictory. For example, ﬁnishing quickly was not always compatible with getting it

right. Finishing was not always compatible with avoiding frustration.

There was competition between “getting it right” and “ﬁnishing quickly,” which
are two potential outcomes of SRL. Cognitive psychologists have referred to this tension
as the accuracy/speed tradeoff (Pitts, 1954). The speed/accuracy tradeoff is a notion that
describes two potentially competing cognitive and behavior orientations. When engaging
in a task, individuals who are oriented towards speed might use a set of strategies to
quickly complete the task. Research has shown that a speed goal and its associated
strategies could compete with an accuracy goal (e.g., Pitts, 1954). The assumption is that
accuracy requires slower completion of tasks. The logic is that wanting to ﬁnish quickly
and wanting to be accurate are potentially competing goals that evoke different strategies.

The tension between speed and accuracy was prevalent for Karen. For example,
when starting her math homework she often rushed through some of the beginning
problems, in which she used formulas that did not help her yield the write answers.
Often, she would have to redo the ﬁrst few problems of her math homework. For Karen,
having an accuracy goal did not necessarily elicit correctness. There were times when
she took her time and concentrated on accuracy and still struggled with accuracy and
completion of tasks. 80 both getting the work done and getting it done right, competed
with not getting frustrated.

In this set of goals, the one most closely related to a mastery orientation is “to get
it right.” As I discuss later, getting it right for Karen did not necessarily mean
understanding for its own sake and improving competence in a particular area. For
Karen, “getting it right” had more to do with performance. Consider some of the

examples noted in the previous section on help seeking. Karen often asked for

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afﬁrmation for writing things in the right place, drawing all math related graphs neatly
and keeping her homework sheets neat. There was some preoccupation with the getting
the content of the homework right. Her parents described her as being preoccupied with
perfection, which might explain her work avoidance. If she believed she had to her work
perfectly and believed that she could not do it perfectly or that it would be too difﬁcult to
do it perfectly, she might avoid the task. Attention to these beliefs might have helped
Karen recognize the ways these beliefs were debilitating. From this characterization, it
seemed that Karen’s distal goals contributed to a work avoidance orientation and

competed with manifesting levels of efﬁcacy that could support SRL.

Metacognitive Awareness

Karen performs well when she just memorizes how to do things. She has
difficulty understanding why she is doing those things. (Mrs. Jones, interview,

4/12)

Often I asked Karen, “What are doing?” “What have you tried to do?” and “What
can you do?” Her typical response was “I don’t know.” I frequently asked what she was
thinking, requesting at times that she “think aloud.” When verbally communicating her
thought processes, her statements were reﬂections of only her actions. For example, if I
asked her to think aloud while doing long division, Karen would state the steps she was
taking, such as “I am carrying the X,” “I am subtracting X” and “I am multiplying X.”
Based on these responses, it is possible to consider the fact that Karen performed rote

functions and described her thinking based on those functions. Mrs. Jones suggested this

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interpretation. While it was possible that Karen did not have language to recognize or
evaluate cognition, I agree that Karen mostly activated scripts for academic engagement.
There was little evidence of reﬂection and ﬂexibility for task engagement--that is, there
was little evidence that Karen was operating with an executive function monitoring and
evaluating features of psychological and behavioral functioning.

This executive function is often refened to as metacognition. Researchers and
theorists have identiﬁed metacognition as an important component of SRL (e.g., Schunk
& Zimmerman, 2003). Flavell (1979) deﬁned metacognition as “knowledge and
cognition about cognitive phenomena” (p. 906). Schunk and Zimmerman (2003) deﬁned
metacognitive awareness as “knowledge of the task (what is to be learned and when and
how it is to be learned), as well as self-knowledge of personal capabilities, interests, and
attitudes” (p.61). In relation to metacogntive awareness, the authors continued, “Self-
regulated learning requires learners to have knowledge about task demands, personal
qualities, and strategies for completing the task” (p. 61). Metacognitive awareness is also
said to involve procedural knowledge, which includes the self-assessment of learning and
making appropriate decisions for task completion (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2003). It was
described as the execution of procedures, such as learning strategies (McCormick, 2003)
to achieve a learning goal. Such procedural knowledge facilitates the control of
information (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2003).

Based on that understanding, Karen’s metacogntive awareness, or at least her
communication of it, was limited. Her inability to discuss and evaluate her self-efficacy,
learning strategies and their relationship to performance outcomes can all be explained as

the lack of metacognitive awareness. There is additional evidence that suggests Karen

had little metacognitive awareness. For example, Karen had to complete a language arts
assignment whereby she had 60 seconds to think of as many words that started with the
preﬁx “con.” I timed her and after the time was up she did not have any words on the
paper. I told her we can do it again and I suggested this time she use a dictionary. She
found many words beginning with “con.” Three days later, she had a language arts
assignment whereby she had 60 seconds to think of as many words that ended in “tent.”
When I began the time, I noticed that she immediately went to the dictionary. Karen did
not use a dictionary for assignments prior to the intervention. Before I bought her a
pocket dictionary, I asked if we could use the dictionary in the house and her parents
could not ﬁnd it. On the basis of this observation, it seemed to me that she was trying to
generalize the dictionary strategy to other language arts assignments. She had difficulty
with ﬁnding words with the ending “tent.” After 60 seconds passed, I asked her why she
decided to use that strategy. She stated that she did not know.

This instance illustrated some of the challenges associated with difficulties of
suggesting strategies and deliberating over them. Her implementation of the same
strategy to a new task without considering the task demands was for me evidence that her
repertoires of strategies have expanded, but she was not evaluating the strategy and
adapting it to ﬁt new task features. That is the fundamental feature of SRL; that is,
evaluating task demands and adapting strategies to those demands.

For Karen’s math homework, for example, the typical format involved performing
the same computations to a number of problems that varied somewhat. In most of her
homework assignments, the last few problems presented different representations of the

problems and required Karen to engage with the problems differently. That is, the last

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few problems required some ﬂexibility in thinking and evaluation of the demands. Karen
often struggled with these last problems. She would often use the computations from the
previous problems.

Karen’s teacher noted that Karen relies mostly on rote learning for performing
academic tasks. Rote learning might be considered part of metacognitive awareness if it
was strategic and intentionally used to overcome the limitations of cognitive functioning.
One advantage of rote learning is that something could be learned to a level of
automaticity and free up other cognitive resources. Automatic human functioning is
viewed an adaptive response to a complex world. It has been estimated that 95% of daily
actions are performed on an automatic level. While I believe that daily automatic
functioning is difﬁcult to quantify, it seems a common assumption in psychological
studies that individuals perform functions automatically and this mechanisms is supposed
to enable individuals to adapt to their environments and free up cognitive capacity, which
is viewed as limited. While having an adaptive function, this automatic functioning has
its drawbacks.

One of the drawbacks of automatic functioning is that there is little reﬂection and
ﬂexibility in automatic responses. While rote learning was the strategy Karen most often
used, the examples above help to illustrate its tension with the ﬂexibility of strategies that
seem to be needed in schools. From my observations, I have noticed that Karen relies on
automated scripts for approaching, among other things, math. For many of her math
worksheets, she would mostly have difﬁculty starting. If she did start the worksheet, she
would often get the ﬁrst couple of problems wrong before I would intervene and remind

her how to perform the calculations. Once reminded of the scripts, she would do well

until a question was encountered that required her script to be ﬂexible. This drawback
seemed especially salient in Karen’s academic performance. Her automatic functioning
made her less able to monitor and problem solve. Rote learning made academic self-

regulation more difﬁcult.

Self-efficacy and SRL

Karen might be described as a dysfunctional (Zimmerman, 2000) or na'r've (1998)
self-regulated Ieamer. From the social cognitive perspective, it could be said that Karen:
1. improperly perceived her agentic capabilities
2. had unrealistic perceptions of her beliefs and outcomes
3. had a conﬂicting goal structure
4. laCked the executive skills to monitor and control her thoughts, behaviors and the
environment
5. struggled with using and evaluating learning strategies
From this perspective, the root of Karen’s struggles was her self-beliefs, which affected
her motivation, goals and behavior. While the intervention was designed to support the
acquisition of behavior skill and metacognition, it was key to support efﬁcacy. In the
next section, I discuss both speciﬁc ways efﬁcacy was targeted and some of the

challenges of targeting it.

Self-Efﬁcacy Development: Issues and Challenges

With the importance placed on high self-efﬁcacy, it was important to make a

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substantial and sustained effort to promote high self-efficacy. Consistent with
suggestions made by social cognitive theorists, I used a number of strategies for
increasing self-efﬁcacy: modeling, reinforcement, verbal persuasion and success. I begin
with some of my efforts to help Karen experience success with both academic tasks and
SRL. In this section, I include a discussion about the intervention and the teacher’s
pedagogy. In this section, I argue that there were certain complexities with increasing
self-efﬁcacy that got in the way of SRL.

According to social cognitive theorists, experiencing success is a way to increase
self-efﬁcacy. From this perspective, success must be achieved with tasks that require
some effort. If tasks are perceived as easy, then there might not be an increase in self-
efficacy for future tasks that are perceived as challenging. For the intervention, I worked
with Karen to support success with both academic performance and SRL. In this
research study, I encountered obstacles with using success to support self-efﬁcacy

development.

The Intervention and Obstacles to Self-efﬁcacy

Early in the research study, I viewed the goal of promoting SRL as competing
with improvements in efﬁcacy. According to the authors of the intervention, promoting
independence with task engagement was important because it provided opportunities for
individuals to exercise choice and control during learning. Independence also provided
individuals with opportunities to experiment with Ieaming strategies. Finally, and most
important for efﬁcacy, independence with task engagement was supposed to provide

individuals with opportunities to evaluate thoughts, beliefs and strategies and consider the

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relationship between them and performance outcomes. Consider the goal of the
intervention:

Its [the SRL intervention] purpose is to empower students to self-observe their

current study practices more accurately, to ascertain for themselves which study

methods are ineffective and replace them with better ones, and to be more
personally aware of their improved effectiveness—that is, we want to show them

how to become smart learners! (Zimmerman, Bonner & Kovach, 1994, p. 4;

emphasis added).

According to the goal of the intervention, Karen was expected to self-observe her
“current” study practices. Based on the logic of the intervention, it was important to give
Karen the autonomy to select strategies. I was to provide scaffolding for monitoring and
evaluating but she was supposed to initiate a strategy, especially for the ﬁrst two weeks
of the intervention. I noticed a number of difﬁculties with providing Karen with
opportunities to makes choices and take control over her Ieaming: 1) increased the time
to complete tasks 2) increased frustration and 3) limited academic success.

As I noted earlier, for the fantasy book report assignment (see chapter ﬁve and
above for the description), Karen had the opportunity to initiate strategies for
comprehension of texts and discuss them with me (see dialogue in the section about help-
seeking). This approach led Karen to select a book that was 1-2 grade levels above her
measured reading level. Karen struggled with understanding the story. Subsequently,
she struggled with writing the report on it. In this early instance, giving Karen an
opportunity to have control and choice and exercise independence made success more

difﬁcult to achieve. I

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When I modeled SRL strategies for Karen, she showed evidence of imitating
those strategies. In modeling strategies, I thought aloud when evaluating the task and
considering strategies that could master that task. There was evidence that Karen
imitated strategy use but did not engage in task evaluation. Karen was working towards
SRL by imitating those strategies but had difficulty with evaluating the appropriateness
of strategies for different tasks. As Zimmerman (2000) noted, individuals move from
imitation to SRL when they have internalized strategy use but have adapted those
strategies to meet new task demands. Consider the instance in the section on
metacognition. In this instance, I describe a time when Karen generalized a learning
strategy from task to another. Generalizing strategies without task evaluation created
difficulties for Karen. The use of a strategy that was inappropriate for the task led Karen
to complete the homework incorrectly and have to spend more time on the task.

When Ieaming SRL it should be expected to be difﬁcult, especially when Ieaming
to deliberate over appropriate strategies for speciﬁc tasks demands. I only want to point
out that experiencing these difﬁculties were competing with self-efﬁcacy development. I
do not want to suggest that self-efﬁcacy development has to happen by experiencing
constant and consistent success. Only thatfor Karen who was already experiencing
academic difﬁculty, the expectation for SRL placed additional cognitive and temporal
demands that seemed to compete with self-efﬁcacy development. She needed more

support, yet was expected to take on more of a Ieaming burden.

Teaching and Obstacles to Self-efﬁcacy

Karen’s teacher built organization and time management components into her

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assignments. For the fantasy book report, Karen was required to complete and submit her
ﬁnal report with an organizational note-taking sheet. The organizational sheet listed
eight components of the book report and had lines for note taking under each component.
Karen was supposed to take notes on this form as she read the book. The note-taking
sheet was only partially completed and not submitted. As a result, Karen lost 5 points out
of 50. The loss of points brought Karen’s grade for the assignment from a B to a C.

In a similar instance, Karen had to write a report on an endangered animal that
was to have been included in a class magazine. As part of the requirements for the
assignment, Karen had to ﬁll out and submit a proofreading checklist, which was worth 5
points out of a total of 50. This proofreading checklist was designed to support the
monitoring of her writing. On the checklist, there were items such as “The introduction
is related to the conclusion,” “All paragraphs are indented,” “All sentences have brigun
with a capital letter,” “Subjects and verbs have tense agreement,” and “The main thesis is
supported.” Similar to the instance above, Karen did not complete and submit the
checklist. Like with the fantasy book report, she lost points and received a C instead of a
B.

In another instance, Karen was required to write a report to King James I that was
contrasting Jamestown and Plymouth. With the report, Karen was supposed to submit
note cards that were supposed to be used to help organize the information. This
assignment was submitted the week I began the research study, so I did not work with
Karen on this assignment. From review of the grades assignment, Karen had many
incomplete sentences, many misspelled words and conceptual ambiguities. Karen also

lost points for not submitting note cards. She stated that she did not make them.

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In all these instances, Mrs. Jones administered penalties for not using strategies
that could support Karen’s academic self-regulation. As stated in an interview, the
teacher commented that the submission of all components of the assignments were to
support the development of responsibility. She stated:

I try to support student’s management of their Ieaming. I give them note-taking

sheets and checklists because I want them to take more responsibility for their

learning. . .to be able to check themselves. . . you know. I want them to self-
advocate. It is my hope they use these [the note-taking and proofreading
worksheets] to help them with future Ieaming tasks. . . . If I do not make them part

of the requirement, students will not use them (Mrs. Jones, interview, 5/7).

I have not identiﬁed any literature on SRL that explicitly suggested using a system of
operant conditioning in order to train individuals to use SRL instruments or strategies. I
use the word train because this is the language used in the intervention and there was
evidence of deliberate and repetitive practice to develop the dispositions to use SRL
instruments. In these examples we can also see the increased Ieaming burden. The
quality of the ﬁnal product was not sufﬁcient for a good grade. The grade also depended
on another level of Ieaming, namely self-regulation. While Karen might have been able
to produce improved work on the projects, she had produced the added work required for
the goal of self-regulation.

While the intervention does not suggest penalties for failing to use SRL
instruments, it does ﬁnd the use of instruments to be necessary in order to support
students’ self-evaluations and monitoring of task performance. In this research study,

however, there was an explicit use of operant conditioning designed to train Karen to use

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and submit SRL instruments. As noted in the above statement, the teacher rationalized
this pedagogical approach by stating such penalties would support the development of
responsibility and self-advocacy. From the above statement and other interview
responses, the teacher viewed responsibility as engaging in inspection and monitoring of
one’s academic work. By the latter the notion, Mrs. Jones meant that students would
develop the disposition to discern when they do not know something and then ask her
questions to obtain that knowledge.

There are a couple of interesting ideas to be considered about the use of penalties
associated with the completion and submission of instruments used to support SRL. As I
have mentioned, I have not encountered a model of SRL that explicitly advocates the use
of punishments to train individuals to use SRL instruments. That does not mean that
operant conditioning is absent from SRL models. Researchers and theorists who draw
from operant theory consider the enactment of consequences an important part of SRL, as
long as they are self-enacted (e.g. Mace, Belﬁore, & Hutchinson, 2001). For instance,
individuals might reward themselves with 30 nrinutes of participation in a more
gratifying activity after they have achieved their speciﬁc goals set for the school activity.
Zimmerman and Pons (1986) called the self-enactment of consequences self-
consequating.

One concern with using punishments for not using instruments designed to
support SRL was that it directly competed with my efforts to support success with the
assignments. Karen’s effort should have matched her performance'outcomes, but
because she did not submit certain documents she received substantial point reductions. I

am not convinced that she cared about the point difference. Regardless, the opportunity

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to use her improvements in her work to boost self-efﬁcacy was lost. I tried to explain to
Karen that her work was of higher quality. I do not think my verbal reinforcement and

validation were all that inﬂuential.

Chapter Conclusion

In this chapter, I used a social cognitive perspective to analyze the data of Karen
Ieaming academic self-regulation. From this perspective, self-efﬁcacy is a key
psychological condition affecting SRL. While Karen reported having self-efﬁcacy, I
presented evidence from the data and the social cognitive literature suggesting that her
self-efﬁcacy was lower than what she reported. Self-efﬁcacy, from a social cognitive
perspective, is used to explain some problems with SRL. In this chapter, 1 related each
section to self-efﬁcacy, exploring its interaction with other psychological conditions and
some of difﬁculties with producing levels of efﬁcacy that support SRL. As Bandura
(2001) noted, efﬁcacious people are more likely to regulate Ieaming by mobilizing
personal and social resources to achieve learning goals.

It was difﬁcult to promote efficacy for Karen. In theory, SRL was supposed to
make academic Ieaming more efficient and effective for Karen. While I am not disputing
this function and effect of SRL, this research study has generated sensitivity to the way
SRL increased the learning burden and made academic success more difﬁcult for Karen.
Karen was struggling with academic content, and the demands associated with the SRL
intervention made Ieaming both academic content and self-regulation itself more
difﬁcult. By working closely with Karen, I was able to notice some of difﬁculties,

frustrations and tensions. In this chapter, I am not arguing that SRL does not work nor

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could not work. Rather, for Karen the cognitive demands associated with trying to teach
her SRL made Ieaming more difﬁcult and this difﬁcultly posed potential problems for
efficacy development.

The increased cognitive burden associated with SRL should not have been
surprising. I explored this possibility in my literature review. For Karen, learning to be
an effective and efﬁcient learner required a time commitment to academic tasks and
Ieaming new ways of engaging in school (evaluating and monitoring). It also meant
experiencing signiﬁcant bumps along the way. Arguably, to become a “smart learner”
Karen had to exert more effort and time for the intervention to be more successful. From
this perspective, it could be argued that Karen was unwilling to work to harness her

agentic capabilities and make a difference in her academic performance.

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Chapter 5
Introduction: Sociological Analysis

In this chapter, I draw on Bourdieu’s and Lareau’s uses of habitus to explore the
relationship of Karen’s socio-economic class to her dispositions, knowledge and skills.
Bourdieu (1977/2004) used the notion of habitus to explain the way material conditions
correlate with similar cultural patterns and dispositions across people in the same social
and economic stratum. Focusing speciﬁcally on child rearing, Lareau (2003) harnessed
the idea of habitus to inform her understanding of different cultural logics of child
rearing. She identiﬁed two distinct patterns of child rearing between middle-class
parents, and working-class and poor parents. I will refer to both Bourdieu and Lareau to
explore some of the ways socioeconomic conditions are related to the dispositions,
knowledge and skills that are expected in self-regulated Ieaming.

Some speciﬁc studies from which I drew heavily were conducted by Lareau
(2003), who was described as “Americanizing” some of Bourdieu’s central theoretical
concepts (Wrigly, 2000, p. vii). Conducting ethnographic research, Lareau has been
instrumental for developing an understanding of the intertextual relationships between
class background and education. Lareau uses Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to explore
class differences and their implications for education. In one of her ethnographic studies
with 12 families—six middle class and six poor and working class—Lareau (1989/2000)
explored class differences and parental intervention in education. She found that
occupational conditions were linked to parental intervention. One ﬁnding was that
working class occupational conditions and the identity of working class parents closed off

possibilities for parents to intervene in and monitor their children’s education.

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Additionally, limited access to social networks and dominant cultural repertoires limited
families from poor and working class backgrounds from cultivating skills, knowledge and
dispositions that could potentially increase chances of academic success.

In a different study, Lareau (2003) conducted what she described as “intense
naturalistic observations” with 12 families, who were again divided by their class
afﬁliation (p. 8). Attempting to move beyond parental intervention, she sought to capture
“the reciprocal effects of children and parents on each other” (Lareau, 2003, p. 8). For
nearly two years, Lareau and her research team embedded themselves in the lives of their
participants. She found that meaningful patterns of child rearing correlated with
particular class backgrounds. For example, middle class parents were more likely to
engage in “concerted cultivation” of their children. Whereas, parents from poor and
working class backgrounds used the logic of “natural growth” for their child rearing
practices. She argued in the book that concerted cultivation helped to instill certain
knowledge, skills and dispositions that were sanctioned by schools.

From these studies, Lareau (2003) identiﬁed patterns of practices that existed
across individuals from the same economic stratum. She also made the link between
these patterns and the kinds of advantages and disadvantages they afford. In both studies,
the habitus of families from working class and poor backgrounds lent themselves to
disadvantages, particularly in schools. As discussed in chapter three, Karen’s household
can be described as working class: I based this on indices of family income, education
level, and parents’ occupations. The purpose of this chapter is to consider the ways in
which dimensions of working class habitus affect how we might understand some of the

values embedded in the literature on self-regulated Ieaming. Class habitus will be used to

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explain Karen’s relationship to the intervention and opportunities for her to develop into

a successful self-regulated Ieamer.

Habitus and Child Rearing

According to Lareau (2003), middle-class parents rely on concerted cultivation of
their children’s talents and skills. Concerted cultivation is understood as the set of
organized activities, such as sports teams, school, and dance and music classes, in which
children participate under the direction of adults. As part of the cultural logic of
concerted cultivation, Lareau asserted that parents reason with children, continuously
assess their talents and skills, intervene on their behalf, and make deliberate and sustained
efforts to stimulate their children’s development. This cultural logic involves parents
forging relationships with various individuals within organizations in order to teach those
skills, knowledge and dispositions that align with institutional expectations. In
connection with these child—rearing practices, Lareau observed that the middle-class
children in this research study developed better verbal agility, strategies for negotiation,
and interactive patterns with adults. The children from middle-class backgrounds
interacted more with teachers and did so in a comfortable way. Lareau found that not
only did parents negotiate and intervene on their children’s behalf, but that the children
also interacted with the teacher in order to ensure their Ieaming needs were met. Lareau
asserted that these children “internalized the idea that it is legitimate and reasonable for
others to adjust their actions to suit [their] preferences” (p. 132).

In contrast to middle-class families Lareau (2003) stated that working-class and

poor families’ childrearing practices were characterized by the logic of “natural growth.”

lll

According to Lareau, this means that as long as children have food, shelter and comfort,
their development is viewed as “unfolding spontaneously” (p. 238). From this cultural
logic, children were given more autonomy during their leisure time. While some of the
children from working-class and poor families participated in sports activities, their
participation in organized activities was much less than that of middle-class children.
Another characteristic of this cultural logic included maintaining clear boundaries
between adults and children. Also, there was more interaction with kin rather than other
parents who might have access to different kinds of capital or who would be instrumental
for creating closed social networks. In addition, Lareau noticed that there were
boundaries between home and work.

Lareau (2003) argued that children from working-class backgrounds who
participated in her study were less stressed, had more leisure time and were more content.
However, she found they had signiﬁcant institutional disadvantages because they did not
have the disposition to negotiate with teachers, the agility to verbally express themselves,
nor the alignment between cultural repertoires of home and school. Additionally,
working-class parents and their children were less likely to intervene in their child’s
education in order to negotiate school mandates.

Throughout this section, I will paint a picture of the family in order to spotlight
the alignment between the family’s cultural repertoires of child rearing with the
repertoires Lareau (2003) identiﬁed as characterizing a working-class habitus. This link
served as a lens for understanding Karen’s behavior and her relationship to the SRL
intervention. I highlight the ways Karen’s habitus lent itself to disadvantages in school,

especially in her general education classroom where the teacher emphasized the

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importance of interacting with adults, organization for assignments, and self-advocacy.
The nuance that a Bourdieuian perspective adds is to consider the link between
SRL and socioeconomic class. The link between SRL and middle class habitus and the
. value placed on SRL potentially worked to value and validate middle class habitus.
Thus, I argue that expecting Karen to regulate her learning doubled her learning burden,
when in fact she needed more support to lessen the burden. Karen was expected to learn
both self-regulation and content. By linking SRL to middle-class habitus, Ieaming to
self-regulate involved more than just acquiring the conditional and procedural knowledge
to manage Ieaming. Bourdieu’s perspective allowed me to see that for this working—class
family, self-regulated Ieaming involved reconditioning dispositions, appropriating new
cultural repertoires, and changing systems of values and beliefs. Connecting SRL to
middle class habitus was also be used explain why facilitating SRL was difﬁcult. My
data show that there was a cultural conﬂict between the school and Karen’s parents
because the school was operating under a different cultural logic than Karen’s family

was.

Parents, Schools and SRL

There were a number of overlapping characteristics between Lareau’s description
of working class and poor families’ child-rearing practices and those practices I observed
in this research study. There were particular assumptions about education that could be
understood using the distinction between different cultural logics of child rearing.
Without multiple participants, it is difﬁcult to make an argument that these assumptions

about education exist within meaningful patterns organized around class conditions.

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Nonetheless, some of these assumptions about education connect to Lareau’s class
distinction of child-rearing practices.

My analysis has suggested three themes that capture the cultural expectations that
are different between Karen and the school: the space where Ieaming happens, the parties
involved in education, and the ways in which Ieaming happens. These themes
correspond to the following rubrics: separation between home and school spheres,
parental intervention and deferring education, respectively. Following an analysis of
these three themes, I discuss implications of learning resources, putting particular

emphasis on computer technology use for facilitating SRL.

Separation between home and school

“To ﬁnd out that she is doing that bad, homework assignments not being turned
it. . .that really bothered me. You know, we work on things here, but we only

work on things she brings home.” (Francisco, interview, 3/26)

The poor and working-class families in Lareau’s (1989/2000; 2003) studies
treated work and home as separate spheres. For Lareau, the separation between these
spheres meant that documents such as papers and grades were left in school,
institutionally valued education was conducted only between school hours, there was
little reading to and with children and there was little parent intervention in schooling
(Lareau, 2003). For middle class parents, Lareau (2000) argued that school and home

were interconnected and education was part of everyday living. Education was what she

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would call the “habitus of daily life” (p. 290). Lareau did not suggest that poor and
working class children were not being educated outside of school. Rather, the education
they received outside of school was not aligned with the cultural repertoires valued in
schools.

Lareau (1989/2000) found that occupational conditions were correlated with the
separation and interconnection between school and home. For example, middle class
occupations tend to have characteristics that work to dissolve the boundary between
home and work. These include, but are not limited to, parents bringing their work home,
entertaining associates and having ofﬁce space in the home. She argued that the overlap
between these spheres served as a model for the interconnectedness between home and
school. The work habits, such as organizing, meeting deadlines, reading, writing and
analyzing reports, appear in the home of parents who have middle class occupations.
Given that these work habits are important for SRL, it is more likely that children from a
middle class background will have observed and acquired these habits at home.

Before delving into the separation between home and school that was so glaring
in this case, it is important to mention that I am not alluding to causality for this
separation. In this section, I made deliberate attempts to craft my presentation of the
data as not to implicate sources for the cause of the separation. Any number of factors,
which include, but are certainly not limited to, curriculum, occupational conditions,
interaction scripts and intellectual competence, could have contributed to, or could have
been, the cause of this chasm. My goal was less to study the causes and more to highlight
instances of this separation and discuss the potential effects the separation has on SRL.

In this research study, the separation between these spheres was glaring. In the

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beginning of this section, I allocate lengthy discussion regarding the separation as it
pertains to reading comprehension. The authors of the intervention assigned a great deal
of signiﬁcance to the self-regulation of reading comprehension because of the ubiquity of
reading in school. After this aspect of the home and school separation, I present other
instances when this chasm curtailed my efforts to facilitate SRL. At the conclusion of
this section, I consider that requiring the dissolution of this chasm between home and
school had placed, or had the potential to place, additional constraints on and produce

multiple points of resistance for my participant and her family.

Expectations for Concerted Cultivation

Efforts at home to support Karen’s reading seemed to be misaligned with the
expectations that school personnel had for supporting her reading. The parents spoke
about their approach for supporting Karen’s reading during the Individualized Education
Plan (IEP) meeting. At this meeting, the principal, teacher and special education teacher
provided suggestions for the parents to help Karen improve her reading comprehension.
It was evident that those within the school expected these spheres to be interconnected in
a particular way. Below are extractions from the IEP meeting; it is a compilation of
statements made by school personnel suggesting strategies for parents to align their child
rearing practices with schools.

Mrs, Jpnes: It is a normal thing that children will do. When they are reading and

something does not make sense, they will go back. Reading is making sense of

the written word. One thing that it is important to do is to work with Karen to

help her make sense of text.

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Principe]: Is there some kind of work she can do to pull that gap together? Take

turns? [The principal suggested that parents take turns when reading with Karen].

Mrs, Jones: [Speaking to the parents] Keep her in ear shot so when she reads a

word that clearly does not make sense. So you are listening but not listening.

ﬂincippl: Maybe give her questions before hand. Maybe read it before hand.

Maybe that would help.

As Lareau (1989/2000) noted, teachers from schools serving students from both
middle and lower class socioeconomic backgrounds agree that reading to and with
children is one of most important strategies parents could use to support their children’s
academic success. As noted above, school personnel suggested dissolving the boundary
between home and school by suggesting ways Karen’s parents could support reading
comprehension.

The principal suggested a strategy that would include the parents in the education
process. This form of engagement would qualify as participation in concerted efforts
whereby the goals of schooling come to shape the interactions at home between a child
and parents. The suggestion that the parents read texts and prepare questions in advance
is evidence that the principal supported and expected conCerted cultivation. The
suggestion presumes parents have the conditional wherewithal to mobilize resources

surrounding school texts in ways that serve to maximize advantage. The strategies school

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personal suggested aligned with a middle class cultural logic of “hovering” over a child
to cultivate certain talents, skills and the acquisition of school sanctioned knowledge.
Based on the suggestions by school personnel, Karen’s reading “problems” could
have been addressed by altering the strategies and interactions at home. The parents were
held accountable for not cultivating certain skills, knowledge and dispositions connected
with, in this case, reading comprehension. Mrs. Jones also valued concerted cultivation.
While it is evident in the passage that she supports this child rearing approach, during
nearly every interview Mrs. Jones commented that the parents needed to do more to help
Karen improve with reading comprehension speciﬁcally, and academic success more
broadly. As argued by Lareau (203), concerted cultivation aligns with a middle class
habitus. Therefore, expecting the parents and Karen to engage in concerted efforts to
improve reading comprehension involves reconditioning dispositions, appropriating new

cultural repertoires, and changing systems of values and beliefs.

Cultivation of Comprehension Skills

As expressed in responses to suggestions made by school personnel and as
evidenced from at home observations, there are some challenges with engaging in
concerted cultivation of reading comprehension. In the IEP exchange, Laura’s response
to school personnel’s suggestions to engage in concerted cultivation of reading
comprehension speaks to these challenges.

m: We told her to read to the baby, the dog. . . just so she is more comfortable.

Lama: We do that [have Karen read aloud to her parents] and I thought that is

why she does not want to do the reading. It does not make sense. Sometimes she
gets the words wrong. It does not make sense at all (laughs). So we [parents and

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child] would be confused.

In response to the principal’s suggestion to take turns with Karen when she is reading,
Laura stated that she suggested that Karen to read to the baby or the dog. She stated this
because she was concerned about Karen’s comfort with reading to more interactive
beings. While there might be some space created in the home for reading to happen,
there is a certain status given to reading and the parent’s role in it by suggesting that
Karen read to the dog or the l8-month-old baby. From this exchange, there seemed to be
resistance to creating interactive reading between the parents and Karen. Laura’s
admittance that she and Francisco have difﬁculty understanding school texts, a point
discussed in more depth later, might certainly have something to do with their suggestion
that Karen read to the baby or the dog.

In Karen’s home there was little engagement with or discussion about classroom
texts. There were few books in the home. Karen stated that she owned four Goosebumps
books, but I never saw them. She told me they were strewn about in her room. Laura
once made the statement that there was little sense in buying books that Karen would
only read once. The kinds of written texts sanctioned as a school text were barely present
in the home. In fact, there was little presence of any texts that might count as an ofﬁcial
school text. There were a number of popular culture magazines, including, but not
limited to, Veggie, Cgsmemlitpn and (damper. While these magazines were used to
support her manicuring business (the magazines were for waiting clients), Laura enjoyed
reading these texts. During an informal conversation, Laura described an instance when
she and Karen read a magazine together. There was evidence to suggest that Karen did

not view reading these magazines as “reading.” One afternoon when I arrived to work

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with Karen on the intervention, Karen, Laura and I were sitting in the living room
discussing the topic of reading.

Resear- cher: I think reading is fun.

m: [expressing agreement] Yeah.

Km: [referring to Laura] Why don’t you read?

Leyla: I read.

Karen: [expressing incredulity] You read magazines.

 

During the research, I did not witness Karen reading with anybody in the home. The
scenario that Laura recounted to me describing the time she read a magazine with Karen
was the only story I was told that depicted a “participatory” engagement with reading.
From this portrait, a few ideas could be gleaned about the separation between
home and school as it connects to reading. First, there is not much reading present in the
home. Any reading in the home involved texts not sanctioned by the school. Reading
was conducted mostly in isolation, especially surrounding school related texts. Last,
there was little engagement in the home with the texts that Karen was reading for school.
With these circumstances, it is challenging to view the home as supporting reading and
the subsequent development of reading comprehension. Assuming reading
comprehension is improved through contributions in the home, a presupposition held by
school personnel, the separation between home and school poses problems for the

development of reading comprehension.

Class Implications of Cultivation of Reading Comprehension

The school personnel who had worked with Karen described her reading

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comprehension as poor. Interviews with these individuals revealed that their assessments
were based on grades, standardized test scores and personal interaction with Karen. As
evidenced from the transcription above and other interview data, school personnel
identiﬁed home practices as essential for improving Karen’s reading comprehension.
During the IEP meeting, Karen’s special education teacher stated to all attendees that
Mrs. Jones was an excellent teacher— her daughter was in her class the previous year—
and ultimately disqualiﬁed her as a potential source of change. For school personnel, the
missing piece for Karen’s improvement was the contribution at home. During both of the
school meetings or during any of the interviews with school personnel, there was no
discussion about what could be done differently in schools to support Karen’s
improvement in her reading comprehension. The responsibility was placed on the
parents, who often times found the language of schooling to be confusing.

Aside from the evidence from Laura’s responses to school personnel’s efforts to
promote concerted cultivation, there is additional evidence that Laura found school texts
to have been confusing. One time at 8:00 o’clock on a Sunday evening, Karen’s parents
found a detailed list of requirements for completing a book report. Neither they nor 1 had
seen these papers and were not aware that the assignment had to be completed according
to any guidelines. The book report was divided into eight sections and they did not
understand what was required for many of the sections. Laura called me to come over
and discuss it with her, Francisco and Karen.

In another instance, the parents showed me an interim report card that they had
received. I could not understand the report card and they could not explain it to me .1 The

grades were understood but the constitution of the grade was not. In another instance,

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Karen was supposed to do a book report on a fantasy novel. The book that Karen had
taken out of the school library was a compilation of short stories. When discussing the
book with the parents, they stated that they understood each story title to be a chapter title
that comprised a novel. The book, which Karen had been reading for a week, was
unacceptable for the assignment.

There are many other instances in which Karen’s parents had a difﬁcult time
understanding the language of the school. Another important difﬁculty involved
understanding the nature of her Central Auditory Processing Disability, which may have
had direct effects on listenting, and indirect effects on reading and reading
comprehension. This particular disability is multifaceted and complex. With difﬁculty
understanding the diagnosis and its implications, there was little the parents could have
done to support efforts to overcome the limitations of the disability.

Because the missing piece to Karen’s improvement in reading comprehension was
thought to reside in the parents’ efforts to align the home and school spheres, Karen was
disadvantaged. Laura and Francisco did not have the cultural capital to merge these
spheres. To be effective at supporting self-regulatory control of reading comprehension,
Karen’s parents would have to work with her to assess her current reading strategies and
suggest ways to modify those strategies to best comprehend texts. The feasibility of
improving self-regulatory control over reading comprehension with parents who have a
difﬁcult time with school related texts seems rather problematic. The occupations of
Karen’s parents also provide little opportunity for them to model reading comprehension
strategies that might be related to their work.

To summarize, the school personal involved with Karen’s education viewed

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concerted cultivation as necessary to improve Karen’s reading comprehension. This
emphasis on enlisting the parents directed attention away from what can be done
differently in schools. While much of the weight of improving reading comprehension
rested on the parents, I observed that they did not have the cultural capital to support this
effort, either through modeling, engaging and interacting. The parents expressed the
concern that the teacher needed to be doing more to support Karen’s reading
comprehension. As Lareau (1989/2000) noted, some parents who do not have the social
and cultural capital to support their children’s participation in the dominant culture expect
schools to provide that capital to their children. With such a key role attributed to
reading comprehension for the development and enactment of SRL, the expectations of
both parents and school personnel left Karen with minimal support for developing
strategies for reading comprehension. Basically, the teacher relied on the parents and the

parents relied on the teacher.

Reading Comprehension and SRL

Before I delve into ways I tried to support Karen’s reading, reading
comprehension and self-regulation of reading comprehension, it is important to
understand why the authors of the intervention put a premium on such efforts.
Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1994) highlighted the importance of reading
comprehension by stating, ’

Because much school Ieaming is gained through reading of textual material,

students must become proﬁcient in understanding text. Teachers can bring text-

comprehension skills under self-regulatory control by highlighting the processes

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students use when they read and summarize text. (p.47)

Though teachers were explicitly named as the supporting factor for rendering reading
comprehension controllable by self-regulatory forces, we can generalize this effort as
being supported by other individuals. Gaining self-regulatory control over reading
comprehension depends on working others who have the social and cultural capital to
support this effort; it depends on another’s feedback and analysis of Ieaming processes; it
depends on suggestions by others concerning the adaptation of Ieaming strategies.

My goal was to support the self-regulation of reading comprehension with
explicit, targeted and strategic efforts. In this effort, immediate feedback was essential in
supporting the development of this skill. In her general education classroom, which has
27 students, Karen had little opportunity to receive immediate feedback concerning her
reading comprehension. Even when Karen was pulled out, she was usually in groups of
2-5 and the tasks were initiation- response type interactions. In other words, the
interactions were highly structured with the aim of producing a right answer and not
reﬂection about the process.

Feedback was not entirely absent from her school experience. Every Friday, each
student would be given a packet, called the “Friday folder,” to take home. The packet
consisted of week’s work, in-class work, homework assignments and tests, with the
teacher’s comments and grades. Often, Karen did not give the folder to her parents and
her parents do not ask for it. These events were signiﬁcant because the Friday folder
provided a potential link to home and school, one that could be used for reﬂection on
strategies used, though up to ﬁve days later. The graded work acted as consistent

feedback for Karen’s performance. I question its usefulness for supporting reﬂection on

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reading comprehension, especially when provided at the end of the week. With the
teacher not giving feedback directly and immediately to Karen and the folder not being
evaluated at home, Karen did not receive the feedback that was necessary for the
evaluation and adaptation of her reading comprehension strategies. Now, there was no
guarantee that examining the feedback from the Friday folder would have encouraged
Karen to evaluate and consider her comprehension strategies. There were many instances
when I tried to use feedback to push Karen to evaluate her strategies, but to no avail. The
point is to highlight ways the absence of that feedback does not give her the opportunity
to develop self-regulation of reading comprehension.

Thus far I have focused mainly on challenges that the separation between home
and school might have for the development of reading comprehension. This aspect
received a fair amount of attention because of the importance for overall academic
success. For example, Karen would do poorly on math word problems because of the
difﬁculty comprehending passages. My effort to support her self-regulation of reading
comprehension was unsuccessful (see chapter 4). The notion of class habitus could be
used to explain that difﬁculty. Now, there are other ways in which there was a
separation between the home and school that I found impeded my effort to foster SRL.

I had a number of contacts with Karen outside of our typical meeting time, which
was allocated for homework. Karen would not do school-related work if her teacher did
not assign it. She would not do school-related work if it were outside our typical meeting
time. As a pedagogical move, I brought Karen to the bookstore. There were a number of
Spark Charts related to the academic work she was doing: writing book reports, the

thirteen colonies, and fractions and decimals. I called her over to see if she thought these

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sources would be useful. Karen immediately identiﬁed that the charts in my hand had to
do with school and said homework was done. Immediately, she asked me if there were
music samples in the store to which she could listen. I was hoping for an afﬁrming
response concerning the charts because there were a number of instances when I asked
her to work with me to develop her own charts for various academic areas. For example,
she was struggling with adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions, improper
fractions and mixed numbers. Though the information was in her math textbook, it is
scattered and not in her words. So,l thought developing a chart where all the steps to
calculate responses to fraction problems were listed in her words would have helped.
While the Spark Charts were not in her words, it could have acted as a quick,
consolidated reference. Karen refused do anything with me that related to school that
was not assigned. This separation made the practice and development of SRL more
challenging.

In this section, I highlighted ways in which the home and school spheres were
separated. Like the working-class families in Lareau’s (1989/2000) studies, the
separation between spheres was stark. Lareau (2003) noted that the working-class and
poor families in her research study allocated more responsibility to children for their lives
outside the home. Lareau discussed this “responsibility” in terms of the absence of
organized leisure time, which is uncharacteristic of middle class children’s lives. From
my analysis, I would like to extend this idea of responsibility as it pertains to life outside
the home. Because home and school were treated as separate spheres, when those
spheres merged through compulsory assignments, namely homework and projects, there

were conﬂicts. found that although each night Karen did most of the assigned

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homework, there was still this separation between home and school. So, taking
responsibility for life outside the home also meant taking responsibility for things outside
the home that were brought into the home. In this research study, I saw that for Karen,
home and school were more than just physical spheres; they were separate sets of cultural
practices.

From the point of view of school cultural logic, Karen’s family was expected to
change their childrearing practices. However, from Bourdieu’s theoretical point of view,
we can see that the home practices are not deﬁcient relative to the school, but rather, the
home is operating on the basis of a different cultural logic. In this case, the bulwark
between home and school made facilitating SRL difﬁcult in a particular way. If the
dissolution of these boundaries is necessary for fostering SRL, then certain people who
have the cultural capital will be advantaged when it comes to facilitating SRL. If that
dissolution becomes an expectation and requirement for academic success, then cultural
circumstances become a disadvantage not only for succeeding in school, but also for
succeeding in self-regulated Ieaming. While my research provided an opportunity to
bridge these spheres, the boundaries actually became starker. As Lareau (1989/2000)
noted, working class families tend to leave the education of their children to professionals

(which I discuss below).

Parent Intervention in Schools

Lareau (2003) stated that a crucial component of concerted cultivation is parental
intervention in institutional organizations, such as schools, medicine or sports. In relation

to school, Lareau found that parents from middle-class backgrounds do not hesitate to

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“criticize teachers’ choices of projects, book report assignments, homework amount, or
classroom arrangements” (p. 177). She also found that there was little hesitation by
middle-class parents to complain about grades. For example, one of the middle-class
parents complained because they were not notiﬁed of their child’s “looming ‘C’” in math.
Lareau also found that middle-class parents criticized certain grades, complaining that
some grades were unwarranted. Lareau described these middle-class parents as “closely
monitoring. . .their children’s institutional experiences” and intervening to support their
child’s success in those institutions (p. 177). Overseeing institutional practices and
intervening was a crucial dimension to concerted cultivation.

Even though Lareau (1989/2000) classiﬁed parental intervention under the rubric
of the separation between home and school, I teased it out for a couple of reasons. First, I
did not want to allude to directionality or causality. That is, I wanted to avoid suggesting
that the separation between home and school causes certain kinds of parental intervention
or that certain kinds of parental intervention cause the separation between home and
school. Second, I wanted this section to be its own category because of the role parental
intervention played in the implementation of the intervention and Karen’s overall
academic performance. Last, interconnecting the school and home spheres may be one
form of parental intervention, but it does not deﬁne all its forms. Parental intervention is
multidimensional and complex. Even though I teased it out as a separate category, it
does not mean parental intervention is conceptually independent from the home and
school separation.

Parental intervention could take on many different forms and have many different

degrees. The teachers from both middle-class and working-class communities wanted

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similar kinds of intervention from parents: read to children, reinforce the curriculum and
respond to teacher requests. Lareau (1989/2000) referred to these as the three “Rs”. For
middle class teachers, a fourth “R” was added: respecting the advice of teachers (Lareau,
1989/2000). While parents from middle-class backgrounds were more likely to challenge
the teacher and complain, they participated in a continuous assessment of their children’s
skills and talents in order to adjust, if necessary, their child rearing repertoires in such a
way as to cultivate or sharpen certain skills and talents that would foster academic
success. Lareau found that parents from middle-class backgrounds “hover” over their
children to ensure academic success.

I argue that like the working class families in Lareau’s (1989/2000; 2003) studies,
there was little parental intervention and monitoring of Karen’s academic performance.
These intervention patterns could be used to‘consider some of the difﬁculties Karen had
with SRL. My goal, however, is not to identify parental intervention as an essential
factor for supporting SRL. To do so would support a position that altering the attitudes,
beliefs and behaviors of parents would lead to better educational outcomes and improved
SRL. As noted by Lareau (1989/2000), it is not solely the parents intervention patterns
that affect academic outcomes, but also the schools expectations and rewards for certain

patterns that affect outcomes.

Intervention in Assignments

The ﬁrst instance of parental intervention about which I discuss involved the
fantasy book report. In this event, there were elements of the separation between home

and school and parents proclivity to defer the responsibility of education to others, which

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is the topic of the next section. The aspects of particular importance for this section are
those that involved the potential for parent intervention to support or curtail SRL efforts.

Students had to choose a fantasy novel on which to write a book report. They
were given a sheet describing the assignment, and on that sheet there was a space for the
teacher and a parent to sign after a book was selected. The purpose for requiring these
signatures was for both parties to approve the reading and to inform parents about the
assignment. Karen took out a book from the school library. For one week she had this
book that was compilation of short tales, not a novel. One evening early in the
intervention I was thumbing through the book and I asked Karen and her parents if the
fantasy book was supposed to be a compilation of short tales. The parents expressed
surprise. From their review of the table of contents, each short tale title was a chapter
title. During that evening, her parents and I agreed that I would inquire about the
appropriateness of the book to fulﬁll the requirements for the assignment. The next day
during classroom observations, I asked Mrs. Jones about the book of tales and she
notiﬁed me that the book was unacceptable for the completion of the assignment and that
Karen would have to get a new one.

For one week, Karen had the book and nobody, including her, recognized that she
began reading a book that was a compilation of short tales. Already more than one week
into the assignment, the sheet that required signatures for approving the book was not
signed by either the teacher or either of the parents. If the book was taken out of the
school library, I wondered why the teacher did not already sign the paper. There was a
good chance that Mrs. Jones would have noticed the book was a compilation of short

tales.

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During an interview, the teacher noted that Karen was responsibility for choosing
her book and seeking approval from the teacher. Karen was not comfortable interacting
with Mrs. Jones. That is, she seldom asked questions in class assignment, maintained a
timid posture when talking to her and, as per Karen’s report, got nervous each time the
teacher addressed her. During observatiOns, the only instances in which Karen addressed
her teacher were to ask for a drink of water or to go to the bathroom. Often when
working with Karen in class or at home, questions would emerge about assignments or
concepts and I had Karen write down to ask her teacher. From my observations and from
Karen’s self-report data, Karen never asked those questions.

As Lareau (2003) noted, comfort interacting with adults comes from experience
negotiating with them in multiple context. Like the working class and poor families in
Lareau’s studies (1989/2000, 2003), Karen interacted mostly with kin. Lareau (2003)
also noted that the proclivity to be comfortable interacting with adults came from a sense
of entitlement and verbal agility, two products of middle-class child rearing practices.
The sense of entitlement comes from the practice of negotiating. Lareau (2003) argued
that negotiation works to validate one’s position because individuals acquire the sense
that conditions could be changed to suit their needs and desires. All the time spent in the
home, I have never witnessed negotiation between Karen and her parents. There was no
evidence of Karen negotiating with any adults involved in her education. Karen’s
inexperience with interacting with adults, the absence of the sense of entitlement and her
verbal stagnation could be seen as contributing to her reluctance to approach her teacher
in any context relating to academic work. It seemed that requiring Karen to select a book

and seek approval added additional stresses on an activity that already carried substantial

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stress. While the teacher required independence by providing Karen with an opportunity
to control the challenge and content of the book, this pedagogical move made completing
the task more difﬁcult for Karen.

Now, it was already over one week into the assignment and I told Karen that she
needed to get a new book from the school library. I suggested that she ask her teacher for
time to go to the library. Upon analysis of the data, I realized the suggestion was
wrought with complications, for reasons named above. Although I suggested to Karen on
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings that she ask Mrs. Jones for time to go to the
library, she did not go to the library to obtain a new book. The weekend arrived and
Karen did not have a book for the fantasy book report assignment. There was now only a
little over one week to complete the assignment.

On that Saturday, one week before the assignment was due, Laura called me on
the phone to notify me that Karen did not get a book from the school library. We
discussed the urgency of getting a book for the fantasy report. While on the phone, I
suggested that Karen go to the library. Laura asked a number of questions about the
library: where is it, are they opened, do I need a library card? She did not have a library
card, so I told her that I would take Karen to the library.

For two weeks Karen did not have a book for assignment. Having only three
weeks for the assignment, Karen had a much shorter time to complete the assignment.
On that Saturday, I took Karen to the library; we spent about two hours there. Karen
refused to talk to the librarian, so I described the assignment to the librarian and she took
Karen to get some books. The librarian gave Karen a stack of books. After Karen asked

me what book she should choose, I suggested that she read the inserts to ﬁnd which

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books most interested her. I provided little support in the process of choosing. Because
it was early in the research, I had little knowledge about her reading history. Karen had
difﬁculty understanding the insert of the book W. At this point, I
suggested strategies for helping better understand it. She got frustrated and decided to
take that book with which she was struggling. Both Peny’s (2002) and Zimmerman’s
(1998) suggestion that students needs opportunities to control the challenge of task in
order be self-regulated and develop better SRL strategies informed my decision to give
her more autonomy to select her book. In this instance, having a better understanding of
Karen’s reading history and using that to support and guide her decision making process
might have helped me make a better decision for supporting her book selection,
especially considering the time constraint.

As per her school records, Karen was at a 4‘“ grade reading level. Only a few
days before the assignment was due, Mrs. Jones had reported to me that W
was a book that was on a 5m-6'“ grade reading level. So, Karen had a little over one week
to read a book that was 1-2 grade levels higher than her tested reading competency and
write a report on that book. She worked diligently to read the book and we spent lots of
time after school writing that report.

There are a few interesting points to be discerned from this event. First, the
inquiry into the appropriateness of the book became my responsibility. I suggested that it
made sense for me to inquire about the book because I was scheduled to go to the school
the next day for classroom observations. After having completed data collection, I am
incredulous that either of the parents would have conducted the inquiry. To continue, on

Tuesday I learned that the book could not be used for the assignment. I worked with

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Karen each night that week and reminded her to get a new book from the school library.
Karen would come home and state that her teacher would not give her the time to go to
the library. I did not verify this claim. Karen did not get another book until the
upcoming Saturday when Laura called me on the telephone and expressed concern that
Karen still did not have a book.

There are elements of Karen’s education being deferred to what the parents might
have construed as a professional. The idea of deferring education will be explored more
in the next section. For now, I would like to highlight the way parental intervention made
successful completion of the assignment more difﬁcult. It was early in the intervention
and information about Karen’s reading level was not yet disclosed to me. I am not sure if
the parents were aware of that information. Based on Lareau’s (1989/2000; 2003)
description of middle class habitus, middle class parents might know information about
their children’s reading level. Having this information would have helped to ensure that
an appropriate book was selected, especially given the amount of time to complete the
task.

Another form of parental intervention could have involved taking their child to
the library to get an appropriate book, one that was appropriate to her reading level. Of
course, that is made possible by the parents knowing the information about the child’s
reading and understanding the implications of that information when choosing books. It
may also involve insight into the contents of the books and it may require reading some
of the contents before hand to make sure the book is appropriate. Another way the
parents could have intervened was by complaining to the teacher about the fact that

Karen was permitted to check out a book from the school library that could not fulﬁll the

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assignment. Given the circumstances of obtaining a book, the parents could have
requested an extension for the assignment. Another way to intervene was for the parents
to know the assignment and be able to accurately judge the book. The purpose of
pointing out possible actions is not to say that Karen’s parents should have enacted
different behaviors. These behaviors require certain dispositions, knowledge and skills
that might not comprise their working-class habitus.

With a difﬁcult text and little time to read and write, supporting self-regulated
Ieaming was difﬁcult. We rushed to complete the assignment and submit it on the day
that it was due.

In this one scenario, there were many factors that inﬂuence the effective handling
of Karen’s Ieaming and development of SRL. For one, I could have done many things
differently to support Karen’s Ieaming and SRL. Similarly, the teacher could have
intervened in more effective ways. The point that Lareau makes about middle-class
parents is that they have the cultural and social capital to intervene in their children’s
education to secure maximum advantage. Overall, there was little evidence that Karen’s
parents exerted the effort to monitor, hover over and intervene on behalf of her education.

During the research study period, I have heard few complaints against the teacher
or other school personnel. On a few occasions Laura and Francisco have complained to
me about school personnel’s effort to educate Karen. During an interview Francisco
expressed in bewilderment why Mrs. Jones was not doing more to help Karen. During
another interview, Laura expressed concern that the teacher might have positioned
Karen’s bad ear towards the teacher. Towards the end of the semester, Laura expressed

concern that Karen’s teacher did not given Karen makeup worksheets. The only times

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the parents interacted with the teacher and other school personnel were during the IEP

and the parent and teacher conference.

Parental Intervention and Karen’s Disability

Karen had’a Central Auditory Processing Disability (CAPD). According to the
parents, this meant that Karen had improper auditory functioning in one of her ears;
Laura and Francisco were not certain about which car was functioning improperly. Laura
was concerned that Karen’s academic problems might have to do with her spatial
positioning. They reasoned that if her low performing car were positioned towards the
teacher, Karen might not be able to hear the teacher and therefore, not pay attention. In
an interview, her parents expressed frustration that information about her hearing
problems might not be passed from teacher-to-teacher and was therefore, not considered
when seating Karen.

This particular concern about spatial positioning was mentioned to the
participants of the IEP meeting. At that point, Karen’s parents were confronted with
contradictory information about Karen’s disability. The special education teacher stated
that Karen had a lexical decoding issue and that the problem was not with her physical
hearing. While the intervention of Karen’s parents was less frequent and qualitatively
different than what Lareau observed from middle-class parents, this instance opens up the
possibility to consider the way the difference in language between the school and home
works to position the parents in ways that make certain kinds of intervention difﬁcult.

I want to be clear that I am not blaming the parents for not having a better

understanding of the disability. Similar to the parents, the teacher had an understanding

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of Karen’s disability that was different from the audiologist’s report. I consulted many
books and websites and talked to doctoral students in school psychology to help better
understand this disability and its implications for Karen’s Ieaming. Because the
disability is connected with the central auditory processing system and its communication
to the brain, it is multifaceted and is often described using specialized language. It took
me many hours over many weeks to read the audiologist report and make sense of it. The
parents had a difﬁcult time understanding disability and therefore, it was even harder for
them to work with Karen to overcome the limitations of that disability.

While it is difﬁcult to unequivocally say that parents from middle class might
have had a better understanding of this disability, Lareau’s (2003) research suggests that
there might have been more of an effort to understand the Ieaming needs of their children
and acquire the resources to overcome the limitations of the disability. As Lareau found,
parents from middle-class backgrounds have the capital and competence to form
networks with professionals that enable them to play a signiﬁcant role in their children’s
education. In addition, middle-class parents understand that their role is to participate in
the education of their children; it is part of their cultural logic of childrearing. In this
research study, I did not see the parents working to understand the disability, even after
they were confronted with a contradictory explanation about the disability during the IEP
meeting.

As Lareau (2003) found, middle class parents also intervene early and often.
During the IEP meeting, Laura expressed a concern about the potential effects of spatial
positioning. The meeting was held two months before the end of the school year. If

spatial positioning were an important variable effecting Karen’s academic performance,

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then it would have only been addressed close to the end of the semester. The teacher

noted that she sees Karen’s parents twice a year during parent and teacher conferences.

Teacher’ s Expectations for Parental Intervention

For Karen, parental intervention was important for a few reasons. For one, the
teacher expected it and viewed different kinds of parental intervention as an index for the
level of value Karen’s parents place on education. Lareau (1989/2001) sought to dispel
the myth that parental intervention was an index of value. The families in her study
valued education but did not intervene the ways middle-class parents because of
occupational conditions, social status and perceived competence. Like the working class
families in Lareau’s study, Karen’s parents parent value education. As we will see in the
next section, their handing over their education to professionals is evidence that they
value education for Karen. For this section, I want to spotlight the teacher’s expectations
for intervention and the dangers of those expectations for Karen’s overall academic
success.

Mrs. Jones made numerous comments that the parents needed to be more
involved with Karen’s education. From the teacher’s perspective, the parents were'the
so-called “missing link” to Karen’s education. She viewed the parents as uninvolved
with Karen’s education. Some of the factors that inﬂuenced these perceptions involved
the frequency of parent and teacher interactions, the frequency of homework submission
and Karen’s lack of academic success.

During the ﬁve-month intervention, Karen and Francisco only had two contacts

with Mrs. Jones or other school personnel: the parent and teacher conference and the IEP

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meeting. For the parent and teacher conference, Laura and Francisco did not attend the
initial meeting because they stated that they were unaware of the appointment. After they
missed the conference, I spoke with Laura and she expressed that she knew the
conference supposed to take place soon but was uncertain of the exact date and time. She
was waiting for notiﬁcation. In this case, Mrs. Jones blamed the parents failing to be
more proactive in ascertaining the conference information. The teacher stated:

all they had to was call...(brief pause), check the website. I am not surprised they

missed the conference. I have said many times, the parents need to be more

involved.

Mrs. Jones also relied on frequency of homework and assignment completion to
make judgments about the value of and intervention in Karen’s school. Mrs. Jones stated
that a major problem for Karen was submitting assignments. I reviewed Karen’s past
report cards and noticed that her grades were signiﬁcantly lowered because assignments
were not submitted. In the past, Karen would have would have only sporadically
submitted homework assignments and larger home and class assignments. As noted
earlier, I took on all the responsibility of ensuring homework and other assignments were
submitted. While there were some in-class assignments that Karen needed to complete
and submit, there were no more issues with assignments that needed to be completed at
home. One issue with this change is that the teacher was able to see that assignments
could be completed with substantial improvements and submitted, but because there was
an issue before the research study began the teacher’s perception that parents did not care
or were uninvolved was further reinforced.

Again, there were countless times that Mrs. Jones commented that the parents

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needed to do more to support Karen’s education. From the ﬁrst transcript, in the section
on the home and school spheres, it was clear that the teacher and parents expected an
effort of concerted cultivation, which as I have noted was aligned with a middle class
habitus. While I found it to be alarming that the only way school personnel envisioned
educational success for Karen was through concerted cultivation, there was an even
greater concern. The concern was that certain forms of parental intervention were
rewarded, which, according to this framework, is tantamount to rewarding habitus.

While providing feedback on student’s drafts of the book report assignment, 1 was
interviewing Mrs. Jones. While writing on student drafts, she expressed that she wished
she could spend more time providing feedback on Karen’s assignments. She also
commented that overall she would like to spend more time on the “Karens” in the class. I
interpreted that statement as meaning those who were struggling and needed more
attention. She made these statements following a statement that she spent more time on
another student’s paper because her parents expected to be told exactly what needed to be
done to get an A. The student whose paper was being reviewed at that time consistently
performed well in the class. Mrs. Jones commented that her parents closely monitored
her homework and often complained about grades or not having explicit guidelines for
getting “As” on assignments. Mrs. Jones stated that she spent more time on the
assignments of student who had parents who closely monitored, hovered over and
intervened on behalf of their child’s education.

Karen was given feedback on the assignment but Mrs. Jones spent less time and
was less thorough with both her feedback and justiﬁcation for ﬁnal grade. Karen and 1

addressed all the comments Mrs. Jones made on her draft. For the ﬁnal project there

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were two sections on which she lost points. On the draft, these sections did not have
comments. After reviewing the ﬁnal grade, I inquired about the justiﬁcation of the grade.
I brought the article back to Mrs. Jones and she read it again. I got the sense she was
second guessing herself because she could not give me a clear reason why Karen lost
points on those sections. Regardless of why she lost points, the teacher did not address
those sections in the draft and did not write or verbally articulate why Karen lost sections
on the section in the ﬁnal draft. Based on the comment Mrs. Jones made while
commenting on the drafts, it is my guess that certain kinds of parental intervention from
Karen’s parents might have led to different treatment of Karen’s draft and her ﬁnal grade.

Perhaps, she would have been provided clearer expectations and justiﬁcation for graded.

What This Means for SRL

From this discussion, the education implications of parental involvement and
expectation for certain kinds of parental involvement have been articulated in other
research (Lareau, 1989/2000). School personnel and Karen’s parents expected the other
to take on the responsibility of making sure Karen does well in school. Karen’s general
education teacher did little to vary her pedagogy to meet Karen’s education needs.
During all conversations, she never deliberated over the possibility of varying her
pedagogy. At home, parents expected school personnel to education Karen because they
did not have the cultural capital to support educational success. These expectations
competed with SRL in a number of ways.

First, because the teacher expected the parents to be more involved and rewarded

involvement by providing more feedback on assignments, Karen was not given the

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opportunity to use feedback to reﬂect on strategies. Feedback is important for SRL
because it provides information about performance. Without that information, it could be
more difﬁcult to reﬂect on current learning strategies. Also, Karen’s parents expected the
teacher to do more to educate Karen and Karen’s teacher expected the parents to share
the responsibility. As a result, I noticed little intervention at home or school to support
Karen’s speciﬁc Ieaming needs. My effort to support SRL was conducted in isolation
because the teacher and parents both believed there was not much they could do. I found
this problematic because there was little reinforcement both in school and at home of the
kinds of engagement 1 was trying to promote. There were fewer opportunities to practice
SRL in multiple contexts.

I also want to talk about instances when Karen’s parents intervened and that
intervention competed with my efforts to support Karen’s SRL. While working with me
after school, Karen sometimes spent over two hours a day working on homework. There
were times when homework was taking so long that I had to leave before it was
complete. In an interview, Mrs. Jones stated that she tried to operate on the formula that
for every school grade students should get ten minutes of homework. Thus, students in
the ﬁfth grade should have 50 minutes of homework a night. Mrs. Jones suggested that
the homework should take about that time to complete. The least amount of time Karen
ever spent working on homework with me was 90 minutes.

In order to increase motivation and work on SRL strategies, I asked Mrs. Jones if
Karen could reduce her homework responsibilities by completing half of some of the
worksheets. Karen would often have math problem sheets with sometimes 30 problems.

Mrs. Jones agreed as long as her parents signed the back of the homework sheet. The

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ﬁrst time Karen’s homework was reduced, she was more motivated to start and was less
resistant to discuss strategies used to solve problems. Karen’s responses opened more
opportunities to deliberate over thinking during the Ieaming task.

Reducing the homework load incited a cautionary response from Laura. She was
concerned the Karen would “take advantage” of this opportunity and use it as an excuse
to avoid homework. Therefore, I had to assure Laura that homework reduction would be
infrequent. By expressing concern that reducing homework would foster work avoidance
goals, I had to try to ensure that Karen made an effort to complete all the homework.
This intervention I found problematic because I was hoping to free up some time and
reduce cognitive expenditure related to task completion so SRL strategies could take a
more central position.

A similar situation occurred in relation to the math games that Mrs. Jones linked
to her class website. Mrs. Jones linked websites that students could visit to help practice
their math. Karen expressed interest in going to these sites to play math games. Laura
was concerned that Karen would see school activities as more like video games-about
which she was incredulous that they any educative value. By not permitting Karen to use
the computer to play these games, Karen was missing an opportunity to develop a better
understanding of content by practicing self-regulation during task engagement. I further
discuss this particular point in the section about cultural capital and technology use.

By linking SRL to middle-class habitus, Ieaming to self-regulate involved more
than just acquiring the conditional and procedural knowledge to manage Ieaming.
Bourdieu’s perspective allowed me to see that for this working-class family, SRL'

involved reconditioning dispositions, appropriating new cultural repertoires, and

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changing systems of values and beliefs. It was not that parent involvement, in whatever
form it took, was necessary for academic success. Only that when it became valued,
expected and necessary for academic achievement, did parental involvement, or lack

thereof, become signiﬁcant for affecting school outcomes.

Deferring Education

As noted in the last section, Lareau (2003) argued middle class parents focus on
developing talents and skills by consistently monitoring and guiding their children’s
Ieaming. Lareau described this engagement as “hovering over” children (p. 8).
Working-class and poor parents, on the other hand, tend to defer the education of their
children to teachers (Lareau, 2000). Lareau (2003) stated that it is characteristic of
working-class and poor families to “hand over” the education of their children to those
who are considered professional, such as teachers (p. 4). Lareau (1989/2000) explained
this difference between middle-class and working-class families in terms of conﬁdence
and competence. Similar to Lareau, I found that the parents in my research study
believed they lacked the cultural capital and social capital to hover over and support
Karen’s Ieaming.

In this section, I discuss ways the parents deferred their education to the teacher
and me. While Lareau’s analysis centered on the ways working-class parents defer
education to professionals, I include here some of the ways parents also deferred
education to Karen. I found that the cultural logic of natural growth could be used to
explain the parents’ treatment of Karen’s education. So, while there was the expectation

that the teacher and I take on much of the responsibility for Karen’s education, there was

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also the expectation that Karen take on this responsibility as well.

Deferring Education to Professionals

“I feel as if you are getting trapped [emphasis added] into being responsible for

Karen’s homework.” (Email correspondence with Mrs. Jones, 4/5)

“Mrs. Jones spends time trying to ﬁnd things wrong with Karen. . .I am wondering

why she is not doing more to help her.” (Interview, Francisco, 4/ 12)

In an email correspondence, Mrs. Jones used the word trapped to point out that
my role shifted from one who was to foster self-regulated Ieaming to one who was
responsible for ensuring assignments were completed and submitted. Shortly after that
email, I went to school to drop off Karen’s book report and Mrs. Jones made a comment
about my assuming the role of her father. These statements illustrate the teacher’s
expectations for certain kinds of parental intervention in education and also pointed to a
trend. In this research study, Karen’s academic work outside of school became primarily
my responsibility. I ensured assignments were completed, printed and submitted to the
teacher in a timely fashion.

The parents seemed to defer Karen’s education to me. On certain occasions when
I did not work with Karen on her homework it was not completed. During my four and a
half months in the home, her father came over and worked with us on three different
occasions. During those times, he worked with us for 15-20 minutes. Laura did work

with us at any time. In an interview, Karen reported that she never worked with Laura

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and only on occasion worked with her father on math. In an interview, Laura ﬂippantly,
though with a soupcon of seriousness, asked if I could work with Karen until she was a
senior in high school.

From the data, it was becoming evident that the parents deferred Karen’s
education to me. Deferring education to me seemed like it could have been a natural
response to the intervention. Still, based on interviews with Karen, Francisco, Laura and 1
Mrs. Jones, it did not seem like Karen’s parents were assuming the responsibility for
Karen’s education prior to the intervention. Based on Francisco’s comment above, he
relied on Mrs. Jones to do more to help Karen in school. The conﬂict in expectations
between Karen’s parents and her teacher is the conﬂict that Lareau (1989/2000) identiﬁed
in her research. Parents from working class backgrounds want teachers to educate their
children and teachers want parents as partners in the education process.

In this research study, I noticed that this conﬂict in expectations became
problematic when Mrs. Jones rewarded the dissolution of boundaries between home and
school, which included, but was not limited to, parent complaints. Lareau (1989/2000)
found that the working class parents in the research study deferred education to teachers
because they perceived them as more competent to handle the education. So, making a
similar observation in this research study was not novel. It was not difﬁcult to imagine
the link between this conﬂict and Ieaming; the novelty came from linking this deferral to
the development and enactment of SRL. For example, as noted elsewhere, Mrs. Jones
spent less time providing Karen feedback on Karen’s newspaper magazine article and
allocated more time and provided more speciﬁc feedback on other work of other students

who had parents who she expected to intervene on behalf of their children if there was

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not adequate feedback for getting a high grade. Mrs. Jones explicitly made this
commitment clear. She was concerned about those parents she knew would complain
and that manifested in differences in the quality and quantity of feedback, which I have
noted throughout this dissertation is an important tool for SRL. I could not say
unequivocally that Karen’s SRL would have improved with more speciﬁc feedback. The
issue is that she did not get the opportunity because Mrs. Jones perceived that it mattered
less because the parents were not involved.

The teacher believed that she could not educate Karen without the parents
dissolving the home and school boundary and aligning their child rearing with schools. It
could be viewed the teacher was deferring Karen’s education to her parents. Mrs. Jones
continuously stated that success for Karen’s education depended on what happens in the
home and this belief affected how Mrs. Jones treated Karen. I argue that deferring
education in these ways could be used to explain some difﬁculties with academic self-

regulation.

Deferring Education to Karen

While there was evidence that Karen’s parents deferred education to those viewed
as professionals, there was also evidence that they deferred responsibility to Karen. This
logic can be aligned with the cultural logic of natural growth. Lareau (2003) discussed
this cultural logic in relation to leisure time. I have taken this cultural logic and used it to
explain the expectations Karen’s parents have for her in relation to school. Karen’s
parents did not work with the teacher and they not work with Karen at home. Based on

Francisco’s comment above, be perceived Mrs. Jones as not doing enough for Karen. I

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observed was that they expected Karen to exert greater responsibility for her learning.

The year before I began working with Karen, she was given a summer folder with
worksheets and other curriculum materials. The expectation was that Karen would have
used the contents of the folder during the summer in order to review the content of the
previous year. Early in the research when I asked to see the folder, Laura stated that
Karen has it. Karen was unable to ﬁnd it. Laura stated that Karen was supposed to work
on the material. Laura did not know what was in the folder. The way I interpreted this
was that Laura was relying on Karen to keep track of the folder and engage with its
contents.

In the transcript data discussed above, Laura suggested that Karen read to the
baby or the dog. While she had the intention to try to make Karen more comfortable, this
statement treats reading engagement and comprehension as something for which Karen is
responsible. The baby and the dog could not take on any of the cognitive burden. Also,
Laura instructed Karen to complete her school reading in the kitchen as soon as she
arrived home from school. Usually at this time Laura had a client. Many of her clients
work full time, and therefore schedule their appointments between 4:00 pm. and 7:00
pm.

Early in the research study, Karen did not bring home the math workbook that
was needed to complete the homework. She stated that she thought she had it because
her teacher checked her bag. Everyday before leaving, the teacher stated that she checks
all students’ bags to make sure they have all the materials needed to complete the
homework. In this instance, the teacher did not notice that Karen did not have her math

workbook. The teacher has taken on the responsibility by checking each student. One of

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the tradeoffs of such a burden is that students rely on her to make sure they are brining
home their materials. While I can see the necessity of checking each students’ book bag,
this practice competed with my efforts to assist Karen with developing habits for writing
down each assignment and ensuring all the materials to complete each assignment were
brought home.

During a parent and teacher conference, the parents were notiﬁed of the teacher’s
practice of checking students. While the parents did not make reference to this particular
instance involving the math workbook, they did not question the fallibility of the
teacher’s perception or practice. During an interview that followed the parent and teacher
conference, the father commented:

it surprises me that she was doing that poorly. A lot of the stuff the teacher was

talking about is a lot of things we did not see coming home, like the math

pretest—we didn’t see that. So, it just tells me that Karen is just...you know Mrs.

Jones said that she checks things as they’re leaving the classroom but when they

leave their classroom, she might be putting stuff away and not bringing it home.

Cultural Capital and Learning Resources

The activation and mobilization of cultural and social capital in an effort to
cultivate children’s talents and skills is characteristic of middle class habitus (Lareau,
2003). This mobilization of different forms of capital would seem to be important for
helping learners develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions for SRL. In this section, I
use the notion of cultural capital to discuss ways resources were present in the child’s life

but were not used in ways to support SRL. In other words, Karen’s parents did not have

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the cultural capital to use resources to support Karen’s SRL. This observation has been a
theme running throughout this chapter. I separated this section about technology because
of the importance I believed it played in supporting Karen’s Ieaming and SRL. Most of
what I discussed above had to with cultural capital.

In this section, I focus on technology. Researchers have suggested that SRL is
important for computer technology (NRC, 2000). With Karen, computer technology
played a key role in supporting her academic success. While I did not observe SRL with
technology use, Karen increased motivation, volition and improved academic
performance with technology. Her engagement with technology use led me to believe
that with more experience with technology Karen could have developed sophisticated
SRL. Karen had computer technology in her home but access to it was limited. Karen’s

parents also viewed computer technology as having limited educational value.

Access to Computer Technology

Kmp: Laura, can I use your computer upstairs?

Lm: (looked bothered when Karen made the request to use the computer) No.
Karen looked a little uncomfortable (could be because I was there) and she kept
looking at Laura as if she did not know what else to do.

me: (After a brief pause) What do you need it for? It is very messy up there. I
don’t think you can even get upstairs. (Karen stood still for another few seconds. It
seemed like she was thinking.) (Laura stated in a bothered tone) I guess you can use

it. . .but you need to clean upstairs ﬁrst.

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In the home, there was a computer with a printer and lntemet access. It was on
the second ﬂoor of the house. The parents’ bedroom was also on the second ﬂoor. The
computer was tucked away in a tight little comer. As evident in the transcription,
accessibility was one obstacle to home computer use. Although the computer was nestled
in a comer on the second ﬂoor amidst some clutter, there seemed to be general
disapproval of allowing and promoting computer use in the home for any reason,
including school. During a parent interview that was conducted early in the research
study, Laura stated that she does not permit Karen to use the computer because of the
cost associated with printing. During the intervention, Karen and I used the home
computer on one occasion; we needed to print an assignment. Karen was often hesitant
to request access to the computer.

Aside from the economic cost of printing, Laura also suggested that the spatial
positioning of the computer led to her unwillingness to allow Karen to use the computer.
With the computer being upstairs, Laura suggested that Karen’s use could not be
monitored. She was concerned that Karen would chat with her ﬁiends instead of working
on homework.

After three months into the intervention, Francisco brought home his work laptop
that had wireless capability, in which the service was not always dependable. Still, there
was a laptop in the home. Francisco was concerned about it breaking and did not let
Karen use it for school. Allowing her to use the computer for writing without my being
there could have supported Karen’s experimentation, implementation and monitoring of
learning strategies. While I worked with Karen she relied too much on my support and

guidance. My support and guidance could have acted as scaffolds for her learning but at

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some point she would have needed to try things out on her own. Because she was always
dependent on me for the laptop, there were few opportunities for her to work
independently on writing.

Economic capital seemed, at least in part, to shape the way technology was
integrated into Karen’s academic Ieaming. There was another factor: value. In the next
section I present evidence that communicates the educational value that Laura believed
computer technology use has for learning. First I discuss the impact that computer
technology had for Karen and then I describe Laura’s response to a report that I made to

her about computer technology use.

Value of Technology

Based on my assessment of Karen’s inefficiency with writing, I introduced
computer use for assignment completion. With limited access to her parents’ computer, I
brought my laptop with me during stints of time when the book report, magazine article
and short story had to be written. The ﬁles for the assignments were saved in a folder on
my desktop. Bringing in my laptop to complete writing assignments seemed like the best
available option. The purpose for introducing sustainable computer use for the
intervention was to encourage writing without being preoccupied with handwriting,
create more efﬁciency for writing by avoiding re-writing drafts of assignments, and
garner interest in writing and revision.

There were many assignments that required research and writing. Her discontent
and distaste for writing with manual instruments, such as a pen or pencil, made writing

assignments arduous. Additionally, having to write multiple drafts of assignments, the

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arduous process of writing became an inefﬁcient rote task. Often Karen would revise
drafts by rewriting the entire story with some minor changes and additions. I noticed
early in the intervention that she used this time consuming approach. Examining Karen’s
manually written text, I noticed that her letters were big and there were multiple spaces
between lines. When she would reach the page limit, which was a prompt for her to
discontinue the writing process, there was superﬁcial, at best, fulﬁllment of the writing
requirements.

Informed by Michigan standardized test (MEAP) scores, Mrs. Jones worked to
cultivate the capacity for descriptive writing- For the fantasy short story, students had to
demonstrate an ability to inundate the story with detail about the setting, characters and
events. Karen manually wrote the ﬁrst draft of this assignment and I noticed that little
detail was included and yet, the four—page minimum was fulﬁlled. For her the
assignment was completed. I had asked her to type the story. She showed a rare
enthusiasm for writing. I took the typed version of the short story and read it that evening
and inserted track changes. The feedback involved the insertion of questions for
clariﬁcation and elaboration and to identify, not correct, grammatical or syntactical
errors. I seldom made the corrections for her. While she struggled with addressing some
of my tracked changes, we were able to engage in a dialogue about the short story and
immediately insert changes into the document.

The fantasy short story was the ﬁrst assignment in which I introduced my laptop.
Every subsequent assignment that needed to be written was also typed in a word
document using my computer. Following the integration of a computer into the

intervention, there were multiple times when Karen asked if we could work on her

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writing assignments. Making these requests were a dramatic shift ﬁ'om her strong
aversion and resistance to writing. Regardless of the reason why Karen was motivated to
write using my laptop, the essential point here is that the technology motivated Karen to
write, created a space for Karen to receive feedback, enabled her to work more efﬁciently
and provided opportunities for comprehension monitoring.

I found that the use of technology to support Karen’s learning and SRL was
instrumental. First, Karen submitted all her homework writing assignments on time.
Before the intervention, Karen did not submit many of her assignments. Second, the
quality of her writing improved. Although Karen was not getting the grades I thought she
deserved, Mrs. Jones acknowledged that the quality of the written assignments had
substantially improved.

Because I wanted to avoid telling the parents what to do, I reported in an
interview to the parents that the quality of Karen’s writing improved, motivation to write
increased, and that the beneﬁts of using the track changes function in Microsoft Word
helped her revise her writing. Laura responded by saying that using the computer to
write made the homework more like a video game. I was uncertain how well Laura
understood what was transng between Karen and me while using Word for her writing
assignments. I would not have made the association between video game playing and
track changes. Her statement also revealed her perceptions about the educative value of
game playing. According to her, video games were devoid of educational value.

Mrs. Jones bad links to the math games located on her website that Karen liked to
play. Laura considered these games as activities to circumvent homework. Karen was

not allowed to play those games. These games were intended to provide practice with

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up-to-date mathematical content. As for using Microsoft Word to type assignments, I
explained to Laura that using the computer to type her assignments involved
sophisticated academic work. Though I tried to make a strong case for the importance of
using the computer, especially for developing and sharpening SRL, I observed little
incorporation of technology, such as the computer, to support Karen’s homework. There
seemed to be a limited understanding of what Ieaming was and how it could happen.
Though the intervention does not directly allude to the incorporation of
technology use for developing SRL, more contemporary researchers have conducted
research studies that have suggested that computer use could be an important tool for
developing SRL (Hadwin & Winne, 2001; Nicol, 2007; NRC, 2000; Whipp & Chiarelli,
2004). In support of this research, my interaction with Karen led me to believe that
computer technology was an important tool for fostering the regulation of her learning.
To restate, Bourdieu’s perspective allowed me to see that for this working-class
family, SRL involved reconditioning dispositions, appropriating new cultural repertoires,
and changing systems of values and beliefs. To support Karen’s SRL through technology
use, Karen’s parents would have to view themselves as players in Karen’s formal
schooling, would have to evaluate the educational potential of technological resources,

have access to those resources and be able to know how to use those resources.

Conclusion

By linking SRL to middle-class habitus, Ieaming to self-regulate involved more
than just acquiring the conditional and procedural knowledge to manage Ieaming.

Bourdieu’s perspective allowed me to see that for this working-class family, self-

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regulated Ieaming involved reconditioning dispositions, appropriating new cultural
repertoires, and changing systems of values and beliefs. Self-regulation implicates other
people in the student’s family, including lifestyle and home resources. Connecting SRL
to middle-class habitus could also be used explain why facilitating SRL was difﬁcult.
My data show that there was a cultural conﬂict between the school and Karen’s parents
because the school was operating under a different cultural logic than Karen’s family
was.

From the sociological perspective, practices and thoughts associated with SRL
might belong to a particular cultural sphere. Thus, by expecting, rewarding and teaching
SRL might disguise power relations by valuing and validating the habitus of a particular
social group. For my participant to learn to be a self-regulated Ieamer. her habitus
needed to be shaped differently. Additionally, those who do not have middle-class
cultural repertoires have a double learning burden: must learn content and must learn
self-regulation. This Ieaming of self-regulation for Karen was not simply acquiring a
repertoire of strategies. By linking SRL to middle-class habitus, Ieaming to self-regulate
involved more than just acquiring the conditional and procedural knowledge to manage
Ieaming. Bourdieu’s perspective allowed me to see that for this working-class family,
self-regulated Ieaming involved reconditioning dispositions, appropriating new cultural
repertoires, and changing systems of values and beliefs.

This concerted effort to foster certain skills resembles the middle class cultural
logic of child rearing. From a sociological perspective, viewing SRL as requiring a
concerted effort requires that parents activate and mobilize cultural and social capital in

order to forge strong relational ties with various individuals from a variety of

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organizations. Such relationships are supposed to work towards establishing norms for
behaviors that are aligned with various organizations such as schools.

Considering Lareau’s (1989/2000; 2003) analyses of class differences and
parental participation in education, middle class parents have the structure of child
rearing in place that lends themselves to facilitation of SRL. Concerted efforts require
that children participate in organized activities whereby the alignment between various
organizations is created so that norms for behavior could be developed, enforced and
reinforced. Such concerted efforts depend on the dissolution of or a never-created
boundary between home and school. As Lareau (1989/2000) argued, families from poor
and working class backgrounds have a separation between these spheres. If SRL required
the alignment of these spheres, certain individuals and certain kinds of participation
would be excluded or would have to change.

While I maintained consistent contact with the teachers and parents, there was not
an effort to align the home and school spheres. During the research study, it seemed that
aligning these spheres would have required substantial changes in child-rearing practices
or school practices. It would have required that Karen have a different relationship with
her parents, one centered on the cultivation of certain skills and knowledge that are

important for SRL.

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Chapter 6
Introduction: A Critical Postmodern Perspective

In this chapter I draw from the work Rose (1996, 1999), Martin (2004, 2006),
Cruikshank (1999) and Foucault (2007) to explore some of the conceptual nuances of
SRL from a critical postmodern perspective. From this perspective, I observed that SRL
looks conceptually different from conventional portraits. Foucault’s work on government
and Rose explication of it, have provided me with the analytical tools to consider the way
learning SRL for Karen could be seen as a new form of government, one in which could
be conceptualized as empowering and disempowering. Typically, SRL is treated as
empowering or treated as a result of empowerment. In this section, I acknowledge this
feature of SRL as it relates to Karen while simultaneously illustrating how SRL was

disempowering.

Empowerment and SRL

I try to support student’s management of their Ieaming. I give them note-taking
sheets and checklists because I want them to take more responsibility for their
Ieaming. . .to be able to check themselves. . . you know. I want them to self-
advocate. It is my hope they use these [the note-taking and proofreading
worksheets] to help them with future Ieaming tasks. . .. If I do not make them part

of the requirement, students will not use them. (Mrs. Jones, Interview, 5/7)

I want her to ask me questions when she does not know something. I want her to

keep track of her assignments. I want her to get her work done. I want her to care

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about what she is doing. I want her to work hard. (Mrs. Jones, interview, 3/6)

The expectations that Mrs. Jones has for Karen are expectations that probably
resonate with many teachers. This statement immediately pushes me to recognize the
rich and complex set of behaviors and attitudes that Mrs. Jones wants for Karen. Mrs.
Jones has a vested interest in promoting behaviors and attitudes that could support
Karen’s academic Ieaming in her classroom and in future grades. Both the behaviors and
attitudes and the outcomes associated with them are not much different from how some
researchers talk about SRL.

The potential effectiveness of this model [Self-regulation Empowerment

Program] is based not only on its development of self-regulatory processes but

also on its message for establishing ‘hope’ and ‘empowerment’ in students and

their respective parents and/or teachers. Empowering students to become more
self-directed leamers and helping teachers and parents further develop these skills
in their children can signiﬁcantly increase students’ motivation and achievement

in schools (Cleary & Zimmerman, 2004)

Similar to the teacher, the justiﬁcation for self-direction, motivation and Ieaming
skill have immediate and future achievement implications. The rhetoric suggests that
students who struggle in school are in reach of h0pe, empowerment, self—direction,
achievement and increased motivation. Mrs. Jones does not use the language of
“empowerment” and “hope”, but alluded to these ideas when she stated,

Really I am just trying to help her [Karen] become a better Ieamer. . .you

know...become more responsible for herself and her Ieaming. (Mrs. Jones,

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interview, 5/7)

School was frustrating for Karen and for her to become a better learner, who can take
control over cognitive and affective conditions, seemed like goals achievable through
SRL. Mrs. Jones stated that her pedagogy was designed to teach Karen skills and
dispositions related to SRL. The question arose; if Mrs. Jones was to instruct Karen on
how to self-regulate, was she empowering Karen to be more self-directed?

In order to consider the complexity of this question, I will pose a number of more
general questions. Is following the direction of an authority ﬁgure a source of
empowerment? How does one know when an individual is self-regulated? How can we
tell if SRL is empowering? These questions have informed my thinking on self-regulated _
Ieaming (SRL). They speak to a fundamental tension in theory and research on SRL,
namely the tension between empowerment and disempowerment. While SRL offers
promises of hope, empowerment, achievement and increased motivation, there seemed to
be certain obligations and constraints associated with this program.

Consider the quotation below:

Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring, and confession,

we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided for us by others.

Through self-refonnation, therapy, techniques of body alteration, and the

calculated reshaping of speech and emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the

techniques propounded by the experts of the soul. The government of the soul
depends upon our recognition of ourselves as ideally and potentially certain sorts

of person. (Rose, 1999, p. 11)

In this quotation, Rose (1999) helped me to consider certain nuances of self-regulation.

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Inspection, monitoring, confession, reshaping and adjusting are part of the discourse of
SRL. Even though SRL is not mentioned in this quotation, the ways of knowing and
forms of engagement are familiar to research and theory on SRL. According to Rose,
inspection, monitoring, confession, reshaping and adjusting are entangled in techniques
of self-govemment whereby expertise is used to achieve a certain kind of being, or at
least recognize oneself in relation to an idealized being. This quotation speaks to a sense
of obligatory self-transfonnation whereby others instruct on ways to achieve such
transformation. Here Rose alludes to the discourse of SRL and points to another side of
it.

I used these quotations to introduce the tension of SRL that emerged in this
analysis, namely the tension between empowerment and disempowerment. In this
chapter, I explore what it meant for Karen to learn SRL by drawing on this tension. I
consider the practices, beliefs and motives that Karen needed to appropriate in order to
become a “functional” self-regulated learner. From my use and understanding of a
critical postmodern perspective, I have come to see SRL as simultaneously empowering
and disempowering. Inspired by Cruikshank (1999) who argued that empowering
programs connected with the production of democratic citizens involve techniques of
self-govemment in which there are constraints on what is possible and obligations for
what to do, I consider a different dimension of SRL, one often given little attention in the
literature. Using a similar rhetorical and conceptualtool as Popkewitz (1998),I use the
signiﬁer dis/empowerment to designate this inseparable nuance of SRL.

The chapter is organized into two sections. The ﬁrst section concentrates analysis

on the relationship between Karen and her teacher. In this section, I argue that the way

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the teacher treated SRL is an illustration of SRL as dis/empowerment. Mrs. Jones tried to
support Karen’s SRL in order to empower her to control her Ieaming and be more
effective at it. In doing so, Mrs. Jones engaged in practices intended to make Karen into
a particular kind of being, one that simultaneously opened and closed off possibilities for
how to engage academically and ethically. The second section is focused on Karen’s
relationship with the intervention. In this relationship Karen was expected to engage in
both psychological and behavioral regulation, which were forms of engagement that
required her to think about and relate to her self in new ways. For the intervention, it was
expected that Karen engage in calculation and documentation of psychological and
behavioral capacities in order to help her conduct her own conduct. Like I want to show
in this ﬁrst section, 1 illustrate the way the intervention both opened and closed off

possibilities for Karen.

Making Responsible Learners

In this section, I focus on the teacher’s pedagogical strategies that were designed
to help make Karen into a responsible, self-directed Ieamer. Mrs. Jones did not use the
words empowering or disempowering. Nor did she use the concept of SRL. Still, her
pedagogy was aligned with empowering students to become self-regulated learners. In
this section, I discuss that pedagogy and consider ways that it could be construed as

dis/empowering.

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Intemalization of Learning Strategies

It is a normal thing that children will do. When they are reading and something
does not make sense, they will go back and try different ways to ﬁgure out what it

means (Mrs. Jones, IEP meeting, 2/26).

I try to support student’s management of their Ieaming. 1 give them note-taking
sheets and checklists because I want them to take more responsibility for their
Ieaming. . .to be able to check themselves. . . you know. I want them to self-
advocate. It is my hope they use these [the note-taking and proofreading
worksheets] to help them with future learning tasks.. . . IfI do not make them part

of the requirement, students will not use them. (Mrs. Jones, interview, 5/‘7)

In this ﬁrst quotation, Mrs. Jones made this statement in order to point to
pathologies with Karen’s academic engagement, in particular with reading. She was
stating that Karen does not do “normal” self-regulatory things, such as persist with
challenging tasks and employ different strategies to complete a task. Mrs. Jones
communicated clear ideas about what learners should do. These ideas are entangled with
the construction of normal and abnormal. The evidence of this conceptual commitment
can be seen not only in these quotations, but also in a number of interactions with Mrs.
Jones. For example, during the parent teacher conference Mrs. Jones provided a list of
behaviors describing what good students do: they study, inquire, work hard, structure
their homework time, do their homework, attend to lectures and take notes during class.

As the second quotation suggests, what good students do is tied to responsibility,

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motivation and commitment to school. Mrs. Jones believed that it was part of good
teaching to ensure the children develop responsibility for their learning. This
construction of teaching makes sense in a contemporary ethos of high quality teaching.

To support the responsibility of Ieaming, Mrs. Jones built organization and time
management components into many of her assignments. For one book report, Karen was
required to complete and submit her ﬁnal report with an organizational note-taking sheet.
The organizational sheet listed eight components of the book report and had lines for note
taking under each component. Karen was supposed to take notes on this form as she read
the book. The note-taking sheet was only partially completed and not submitted. As a
result, Karen lost 5 points out of 50. The loss of points brought Karen’s grade for the
assignment from a B to a C.

In a similar instance, Karen had to write a report on an endangered animal that
was to have been included in a class magazine. As part of the requirements for the
assignment, Karen had to ﬁll out and submit a proofreading checklist, which was worth 5
points out of a total of 50. This proofreading checklist was designed to support the
monitoring of her writing. On the checklist there were items such as “The introduction is
related to the conclusion,” “All paragraphs are indented,” “All sentences have begun with
a capital letter,” “Subjects and verbs have tense agreement,” and “The main thesis is
supported.” Similar to the instance above, Karen did not complete and submit the
checklist. Like with the fantasy book report, she lost points and received a C instead of a
B.

In another instance, Karen was required to write a report to King James that was

contrasting Jamestown and Plymouth. With the report, Karen was supposed to submit

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note cards that were supposed to be used to help organize the information. This
assignment was submitted the week I began the research study, so I did not work with
Karen on this assignment. Reviewing the graded assignment, Karen had many
incomplete sentences, many misspelled words and conceptual ambiguities. Karen also
lost points for not submitting note cards. She stated that she did not make them.

In all these instances, Mrs. Jones administered penalties for not using instruments
that were supposed support Karen’s academic self-regulation. As stated in an interview,
Mrs. Jones commented that the submission of all components of the assignments were to
support the development of responsibility and to help with future Ieaming tasks. She
believed that if these components were not built into the assignment, students would not
use them. Penalties were seen as a necessary component to be successful at helping
students become responsible learners who could internalize SRL instrument use. To
restate part of Mrs. Jones quotation,

It is my hope they use these [the note-taking and proofreading worksheets] to help

them with future Ieaming tasks. . .. If I do not make them part of the requirement,

students will not use them.
While the empowering feature of SRL is seen in its potential to improve academic
achievement and responsibility by supporting the internalization of SRL strategy use,
there is another side to this pedagogical goal that needs attention. In this context,
Ieaming responsibility and self-direction required obedience and obligation. It required
that Karen do what the teacher told her to do in the way the teacher expected. The
expectation was that Karen would internalize strategy use and become less dependent on

external direction.

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Karen and I worked with nearly all the instruments required for the assignments.
I notiﬁed Mrs. Jones and requested that Karen not lose points on the assignment. Mrs.
Jones believed that Karen needed to take responsibility for her Ieaming and failing to do
so must have been followed with consequences. Mrs. Jones stated,

She has to learn there are consequences to her actions, you know. If I excuse her

behavior she is just going to think it is okay. Really I am just trying to help her

become a better Ieamer. . .you know. . .become more responsible for herself and

her Ieaming. (Mrs. Jones, interview, 3/18)
Furthermore, she stated,

What is going to happen when you no longer work with her. . .is she going to use

these [making reference to the learning instruments]? (Mrs. Jones, interview,

3/ 18)
Mrs. Jones viewed the parents as uninvolved in Karen’s education and in this quotation
suggested that it was her duty to shape Karen into a responsible, self-directed Ieamer.
This position made a lot of sense. If Mrs. Jones viewed Karen as lacking academic
supports or the self-regulatory skill, it made sense that she worked to harness her
capabilities in order to be more self-sufﬁcient with her Ieaming. The paradox is that
using those documents were also a form of obedience. The instruments structured the
assignments in ways that made completing the assignments more like adaptation to a
narrow way of doing the assignments. For Karen to have counted as being responsible,
she had to follow use and submit these instruments. If she did not, penalties were
administered. While Karen was supposed to learn self-advocacy and responsibility, she

had to follow orders and remain obedient.

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In this context, I want to point to the ways teaching SRL involved
dis/empowerment; Karen was expected to learn responsibility and self-advocacy by doing
what the teacher required. Is the nuance of SRL that I discuss here speciﬁc only to this
case? It could be argued that the teacher’s limited exposure to models of teaching SRL
contributed to her approach to fostering SRL. However, I am not convinced that Mrs.
Jones’ emphasis on internalization of strategy use for future SRL differs from models of
SRL deveIOpment. For example, discussing the social origins of SRL, Schunk and
Zimmerman (1997) suggested that individuals go through a series of stages ranging from
imitation to the self-regulation of strategy use. Intemalization is a key mechanism for
this model. According to this model, individuals count as self-regulated when they have
internalized strategies leamed from models or direct teaching, and then adapt those
strategies to different contexts.

The assumption in both the literature and Mrs. Jones pedagogy is that if students
can acquire SRL strategies and employ them without explicit external direction, they
have become self-regulated. While that might be one way of understanding SRL, such an
assumption calls into question the empowering, self-determined features of SRL. As
Martin (2007) noted, external origination of SRL troubles a clear distinction between
SRL that is empowering and disempowering.

...it is by no means always clear that the highly scripted and externally imposed

sequences of strategic activity and instruction evident in many studies and

interventions in the area of students’ self-regulated Ieaming leave adequate room
for the fostering of true self-determination with respect to students’ choice and

enactment of their Ieaming and study strategies. (Martin, 2007, p. 82)

167

If SRL involves the internalization of strategy use, and even the rational deliberation of
strategy use, then, as Martin suggested, it becomes less clear that individuals are either
empowered or disempowered. While Martin’s observation is important for considering
the complexity of SRL, I depart from him and argue that the internalization of strategy
use, and the rational deliberation over strategy use, is dis/empowering. While Martin is
not denying this dual feature of SRL, he does not go far enough and state it.

Before continuing, I wanted to brieﬂy discuss what I mean by rational
deliberation of Ieaming strategy use. According to Schunk and Zimmerman (1997) if
individuals imitate SRL strategies observed from models or explicitly taught, then they
would not count as self-regulated. If those individuals have a repertoire of strategies
(procedural knowledge) and consider the conditions in which to use them (conditional
knowledge), they would count as self-regulated learners. I see the place where
procedures and conditions meet as the point of rational deliberation. At this point self-
regulated leamers ﬁgure out what strategies best suit the conditions and adapt to those
conditions in ways that allow them to achieve their Ieaming goals. Arguably, reaching
the point at which individuals are able to rational deliberate is empowering because that
is when individuals, according to Zimmerman (2000), are self-regulating themselves.
Arguably, discipline, obligation and obedience make this empowerment possible. An
argument from this position might be that disempowerment is necessary to lead to
empowerment. For that reason, the fact that Karen was obliged to use SRL instruments
in order to be more responsible was necessary for later empowerment. This logic
characterized Mrs. Jones’ pedagogy.

For now I will superﬁcially point to a concern with treating rational deliberation

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as only empowering. When individuals are rationally deliberating over which strategy to
use given certain contextual features, it is not always clear that this deliberative process is
free from external control. Consider a statement about autonomous engagement made by
Marshall (1996), who is a philosopher of education:

It might be said...that autonomy was merely doing one’s own thing, doing what

one wants to do, being spontaneous and creative, as opposed to being conﬁned to

the calculations of (cold and hard?) reason. (p. 84)
In this quotation, Marshall suggested the calculations of reason could be construed as
conﬁnement whereby a sense of obligation to a pursuit knowledge using a narrow set of
tools and values might be instituted. From a critical postmodern perspective, reason is
tied to technologies of control and is not autonomous from power, but is in fact tied to
systems of government. To argue that obedience, obligation and constraint are necessary
for rational deliberation, which is a form of empowerment, ignores the political and
social constitution of that form of reason. I bring up this point in order to point to the
concerns with justifying obedience and obligation because it could lead autonomy,
empowerment and self-regulation.

I began this section with highlighting some of the ways the teacher tried to make
Karen into a responsible learner by building SRL instruments into her assignments. I
argued that Ieaming this responsibility and self-advocacy involved doing what the teacher
wanted. This feature of SRL helps to point out one of the conceptual complexities of
teaching SRL, namely that to learn to academically self-regulate required discipline and
obedience to some social norm. It required that Karen internalize rules for engagement.

I drew from Martin (2007) to highlight the complexities in seeing this internalization as

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only empowering.

Homogenizing the Rules of Engagement

In this class, all students had to use the same SRL instruments in the same way.
These rules of engagement were part of the construction of responsible, normal students.
I noticed that in the literature, researchers have studied what successful students think and
do to inform their understanding of SRL. The deﬁnition of SRL and successful is
circular, in that SRL is deﬁned by success and success is deﬁned by SRL. I understand
that not all researchers operate with this conceptual commitment. Still, I have noticed
that when successful and self-regulated become correlated, the possibility opens to
homogenize the rules of engagement. That is, successful students could be used as
prototypes for how all students should behave and think. Thus, the role of teachers
becomes helping naive and dysfunctional self-regulated learners to be like their
successful, self-regulated counterparts.

In this research study, there was no evidence that Mrs. Jones was observing her
successful students and crafting her pedagogy so that all students could be like them.
There was no evidence that Mrs. Jones read research that provided a prototype for what
successful, self-regulated learners think and do. That notwithstanding, Mrs. Jones
operated with the assumption that self-regulated learners are successful and those
successful students are self-regulated learners. She stated,

If you want to see a self-regulated learner, you should look at [made a reference to

the best perfomring student in the class]. (Teacher, interview, 2/ 14)

The teacher and I had two interviews early in the research whereby we discussed the

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notion of SRL, which was informed by the social cognitive literature. During one of
these interviews, she responded with the quotation noted above. The sort of knee-jerk
reaction to assign SRL to her best performing student was revealing. First, I viewed this
statement as a justiﬁcation for the homogenization of the rules of engagement. If a
particular student who experienced success is the prototype for the successful, self-
regulated learner, then it seems that others might have been measured in relation to this
prototype.

While it is difﬁcult to say that Mrs. Jones crafted her pedagogy based on her
successful students, she homogenized the rules of engagement by assigning all students
the same SRL instruments. In a classroom with 27 students in which Mrs. Jones believed
it was her responsibility to teach curriculum, which included subject matter knowledge
and SRL, individualizing SRL strategy use might have seen less plausible. Not only for
Karen but for other students, Mrs. Jones believe that if children were left to their own
devices for SRL, they might be ineffective at regulating their Ieaming. This perception
was a reasonable evaluation for Karen. The worksheets were intended to provide Karen
with additional Ieaming strategies to add to her repertoire. They were also intended to
support the development of self-sufﬁciency by providing Karen with the tools to monitor
and evaluate her own work. Homogenizing the rules for engagement seemed like a
reasonable practical response to a class that had students who were ineffective self-
regulated learners.

I noticed that Karen did not like to use these instruments, nor did she ﬁnd them
helpful or necessary to complete the assignments. In an interview with Karen, I asked

about her experience with the note-taking instrument for the fantasy book report:

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Stephen: Do you ﬁnd this [pointing to the note-taking sheet] helpful for writing
the report?

Karen: (silence for 30 seconds) uh. . .I don’t know. . .sort of.

Stephen: What do you mean?

Karen: I don’t know. [approximately 20 seconds pass] I don’t like to use it cause

I don’t like to write.

For her, using these instruments was more of a burden, both cognitive and temporal.
While these strategies might have empowered Karen to become more self-sufﬁcient with
monitoring and checking her work, the instruments were not tailored to her speciﬁc
needs. By homogenizing strategy use, there was the chance to be empowered to control

Ieaming but while having to do tasks the same ways as all other students.

SRL and the Moral Imperative
She has to learn there are consequences to her actions, you know. If I excuse her
behavior she is just going to think it is okay. Really I am just trying to help her
become a better learner. . . you know. . .become more responsible for herself and

her Ieaming. (Mrs. Jones, interview, 3/28)

I keep coming back to the parents. Karen is not a self-motivated learner and so
the parents need to help her with that. Her sister. . .what’s her name. . .she on the
other hand is self-motivated, she doesn’t need her parents or friends. You

know. . .she cares about school (Mrs. Jones, Interview, 4/13).

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I juxtaposed these quotations to spotlight the way character was associated with
SRL. The ﬁrst quotation speaks to responsibility and becoming better, themes that
appeared throughout Mrs. Jones’ reﬂection on her pedagogy. The second quotation
introduces the notion of “care” as it is associated with academic engagement. From these
quotations, it seems that Mrs. Jones used SRL as a measurement of character. I have
already discussed the conflation of the self-regulated learner and the successful student.
In this section, the good student is added in this conceptual conﬂation. In the second
quotation above, Mrs. Jones referred to Karen’s sister, who she had never met, and
described her as self-motivated, independent and caring because she was successful in
school. Mrs. Jones did not use the concept SRL to describe Karen’s sister but used
language often connected to SRL.

As discussed in the previous section, Mrs. Jones administered penalties for not
using and submitting SRL instruments. In the ﬁrst quotation in this section, Mrs. Jones
justiﬁed her use of punishment by claiming to support greater responsibility for Karen’s
Ieaming and for her self. When I asked Mrs. Jones what she meant when she stated she
wanted Karen to be more responsible for herself, she stated,

I want her to ask me questions when she does not know something. I want her to

keep track of her assignments. I want her to get her work done. I want her to care

about what she is doing and work hard. (Mrs. Jones, interview, 4/11)

Aside from connecting SRL to success, caring and responsibility, there was also
evidence that trustworthiness and competence were part of this grouping. In one
instance, there was an exam item that many students in the class did not answer. Karen,

who performed poorly on the exam and in the subject, received fewer points on that item

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than other students who have performed well on the exam and who have consistently
performed well in the subject. Karen received full penalty for the missed item (-5) and
two other students received a partial deduction (~2). I did not ask Mrs. Jones about this
discrepancy. One way to interpret this grading discrepancy was that Mrs. Jones viewed
those successful students as more competent to answer the question. Perhaps these
successful students committed a mere oversight. Karen, on other hand, might have been
seen as less competent to answer the question even if she attempted to do it. Part of this
grade assignment could have also involved the responsibility Mrs. Jones felt to teach
Karen about understanding the consequences of her actions. Mrs. Jones felt she was
responsible for teaching Karen to understand the consequences of her behaviors.

In other instances, students who performed well in Mrs. Jones’ class received less
criticism for losing or forgetting certain objects for school. For example, a student who
was getting all A’s could not ﬁnd her music instrument was working with a school
administrator to locate her instrument. Mrs. Jones stated to the administrator “Oh, I
wouldn’t worry. She is a good student.” While there was not an analogous situation
involving an instrument with Karen, the statement illustrates that assignment of
trustworthiness to students who perform well. When Karen turned in assignments late,
incomplete or not at all, her teacher attributed those behaviors Karen’s lack of
motivation, care and responsibility.

Another observation related to second quote connects with the complexity of
teaching SRL. Mrs. Jones identiﬁed Karen as lacking self-motivation in part because she
does not care about school. Mrs. Jones suggested that the parents were an important

inﬂuence for the cultivation of care and that Karen needed to be taught to care. The

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suggestion that Karen need to be taught to care deconstructs the notion of self-motivation.
Teaching an individual self-motivation seems to deconstruct the notion of self-
motivation. I read this complexity in much of the theory of SRL in which researchers
and theorists have concluded that individuals must be taught SRL.

Even though Mrs. Jones had limited technical exposure to research and theory of
SRL and did not explicitly organize her pedagogy using SRL, the teacher used our
discussion to immediately assign students into categories: self-regulated and not self-
regulated. To assign the self-regulated status to her best performing student revealed to
me that the Mrs. Jones conﬂated the ideas of successful student with the self-regulated
learner. As part of this conﬂation, I also observed that Mrs. Jones included the notion of
the “good student.” I argue that the teacher conﬂated notions of the good, successful and
self-regulated student; that is, they all meant the same thing. The conﬂation of these
notions pushed me to consider the way SRL was a technique of normalization.

In the literature, researchers have also made these conﬂations and have developed
homogenized strategy plans. For example, to validate a 13 SRL strategy scheme,
Zimmerman and Pons (1986) tested 40 so-called high achieving students and 40 so-called
low achieving students. Based on students’ self-reports of strategy use in structured
interviews, the authors contended they were able to predict with 93% accuracy those who
were in the high achieving group and those who were in the low achieving group. Those
in‘the high achieving group were questioned about their strategy use during Ieaming and
the researchers found an alignment between what successful students do and this 13 SRL

strategy scheme.

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Responsible Learners

The goal of this chapter was to consider ways SRL looked dis/empowering.
Considering the data involving Mrs. Jones, I would like to talk about three pedagogical
features—homogenization, internalization and people making—that helped to highlight
this nuance of SRL. From this data, it seemed that Mrs. Jones believed that it was
important to facilitate the use of SRL instruments. She was hoping that students would
use these instruments, internalize them and use them for future tasks. Her efforts were
tied to the production of individuals who were responsible, self-advocates and motivated.
And, as Mrs. Jones stated, requiring the use and submission of these instruments and
administering penalties for failure to use and submit them was a source of incentive for
students to use SRL instruments.

Mrs. Jones does not explicitly organize her pedagogy in terms of SRL. She does
not read literature on SRL and so it is reasonable that when trying to support SRL, there
might be pedagogical misalignments with ways researchers are suggesting to teach SRL.
Some SRL researchers would not necessarily suggest homogenizing Ieaming strategies.
This examination pushed me to consider the ethical implications of constructing SRL
using a narrow set of behaviors and attitudes. It also pushed me to consider some of the
dangers of conflating successful, good and self-regulated. The teacher conﬂated
successful students with self-regulated learners and attributed a narrow set of behaviors
and attitudes to what counts as SRL. In the literature, this conﬂation has not been
uncommon. By conﬂating the successful student with the self-regulated leamer, the
teacher relied on an image of an ideal student that acted as a model for what her students

needed to think and do. In an interview, the teacher stated that she intentionally

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administered consequences for behaviors that deviated from SRL because she wanted to
teach students to be responsible. The teacher seemed to believe that the purpose of SRL
was to help manage and normalize behavior. Prescribing such scripts for academic
engagement blurred the distinction between self-regulated academic performance that

was empowering and disempowering.

Calculation and Documentation: An Exercise in Truth

In a text written by Foucault (2007), he began by recounting the tactics Leuret, a
French psychiatrist, used to treat and cure a patient. In this account, Foucault described
an interrogation whereby Leuret used showers as a coercive procedure until his patient
recognized and declared his madness. Foucault identiﬁed procedures associated with
helping the mentally ill recognize and declare their madness as an ancient procedure. As
he noted, before the middle of the 19‘h century, those involved in medicine believed there
was a problem with the incompatability between madness and the recognition of
madness. Therefore, during those times, Foucault noted, there was the belief that one
could be cured “if one managed to show them [doctors] that delirium is without any
relation to reality” (p. 148). Foucault referred to the practice of recognition of madness
as truth therapies.

As Foucault (2007) noted, truth therapies, which have involved individuality,
truth, discourse and coercion, have had places in various institutions, such as judicial,
psychiatric and religious institutions. The rationale for truth therapies is that “one needs
for his own salvation to know as exactly as possible who he is and also, which is

something rather different, that he needs to tell it as explicitly as possible to some other

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people” (Foucault, 2007, p. 148). For Foucault, truth therapies involved making oneself
intelligible and confessing that intelligibility. It is not difﬁcult to see the coercive
practices embedded in the truth therapy conducted by Leuret. Showering an individual
until he recognized and confessed his madness is a fairly blatant display.

I began this section about truth therapies because of some parallels between the
implementation of the SRL intervention and truth therapy. There are also many
differences between these accounts. I certainly do not want to suggest that the practices
involved with the SRL intervention involved such erosive and productive psychological
interrogation practices. I was not administering corporeal punishment to get her to admit
that she was a “bad” student but I was working with her to help her understand and tell
truths about herself. Thus, the interesting connection for me involved the consideration
of the SRL intervention as a form of truth therapy. The goal of the intervention was for
Karen to develop the skills and knowledge to recognize and speak the truth about herself:
self-efﬁcacy, goals, strengths, weaknesses and behaviors. This truth was to be discerned
through careful, detailed calculations of her thinking and behavior. Apparent in the
social cognitive perspective, calculation and documentation of beliefs and behaviors were
to support self-awareness and subsequently self-control. Thus, calculation and
documentation were in service of liberating and empowering ends. From a critical
postmodern perspective, it was possible to see a different side of calculation and
documentation.

Using a critical postmodern perspective, I was able to detect another side to the
empowerment coin, one not typically discussed in literature on SRL. Learning to

calculate and document behavior and psychology, including beliefs, thought processes,

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knowledge, goals and learning strategies was for Karen an exercise in telling the truth
about herself. Learning to tell the truth about herself involved certain obligations to do
things and see things a certain way. Learning to tell the truth about her self also involved
the inclusion of some self-interpretations and the suppression of others. Also, my role in
intervention was one of an expert, who was guiding, correcting, shaping and training
Karen to do things and see things a certain way. Learning for Karen resembled what
Rose (1996) described as “a forrrr of professional work to be accomplished with the aid of
professional expertise and the under the aegis of scientiﬁcally codiﬁed knowledge” (p.
125).

Before I continue, I will present the steps in the argument for this section. Using
techniques of calculation and documentation, I argue that SRL is a form of truth telling.
The relationship to truth therapy is that the intervention was designed to support the
development of this truth in hopes to enable Karen to perform better in school. There
was also allusion to the idea that SRL could support lifelong Ieaming (Zimmerman,
Bonner, and Kovach, 1996). In order to achieve academic success, Karen was eXpected
to know and say something truthful about her beliefs, goals, strengths, weaknesses and
behaviors. The validation of truthfulness was supposed to be informed by reality, which
in this case could be considered performance outcomes. Then, I suggest that truth telling
involved the production of some personal truths and the suppression of others. For SRL,
I suggest that Karen was expected to see her self (thoughts and behaviors) in a particular
way, one that closed off possible identities and epistemologies. Next I consider the
ethical implications of telling the truth, suggesting that truth often involved coercion or

imposition. From this line of argument, I am not suggesting that the truthfulness brought

I79

about from the SRL intervention is associated with negative outcomes. I think Karen
could have beneﬁted greatly from acquiring SRL skill. I am only suggesting that for her
to be a self-regulated learner, elements of dis/empowerment could have been discerned
because of the relation drawn to the notion of truth therapy.

In this section, the data on which I rely connects to my experience with Karen and
the intervention. For the intervention, there is consideration of not only Karen’s response
to it but consideration of what was supposed to happen if Karen did everything she was
supposed. I emphasize the latter part for a couple of reasons: 1) it is a consideration in a
four-part framework used by Foucault to consider subjectivity 2) it reveals some of the
ethical nuances of the SRL intervention. As illustrated in previous chapters, Karen
struggled with certain components of the intervention. That struggle is important to

consider and it is also important to consider what was supposed to happen.

The Truth Will Set Karen Free

As noted in chapter four, the authors of the intervention stated that it was
important to align self-efﬁcacy with reality, which in this case could be thought of as
performance outcomes. Karen was expected to align what she believed about herself and
what she did. This feature of the SRL intervention illustrates one of the more
unambiguous parallels to the notion of truth therapy, especially considering my role in
guiding, shaping and monitoring the procedures used to know and speak the truth about
the beliefs and its relationship to outcomes (see chapter four). With self-efficacy, I was
helping Karen learn to apply ways to measure her beliefs. As noted by the authors of the

intervention, if self-efﬁcacy was too high or too low in relation to outcomes there could

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be a problem with SRL (Zimmerman, Bonner & Kovach, 1996). Karen was expected to
know and say something true about her self-efﬁcacy and that truth was supposed to be
measured in relation to how successful she was.

To further explain the connection between efﬁcacy and truth therapy, consider the
complexity in measuring Karen’s self-efﬁcacy. On items taken from the Motivated
Strategies Learning Questionnaire, Karen reported a high sense of self-efﬁcacy for each
subject matter. This questionnaire was the ﬁrst step in helping Karen declare certain
truths about her self. Because Karen reported a high sense of self-efﬁcacy, it could have
been a signal that efﬁcacy was not something that needed targeting, unless of course a
high sense of efﬁcacy was accompanied by poor performance outcomes. With a
discrepancy between efﬁcacy and performance outcomes, there were two possibilities
that were considered: 1) there were issues with the truthfulness of Karen’s sense of
efﬁcacy or 2) other variables played a role in the discrepancy.

For the latter possibility, it might be argued that explanations for performance had
something to do with expectancy and value, two key motivators. Cognitive oriented
researchers have argued that the complete absence of any of these variables could deter
individuals from engaging in a task (Wigﬁeld & Eccles, 2000). If individuals had no
value in performing a task or was convinced that they could not complete the task, they
would not engage in the task. The variables have been quantiﬁed to explain variations in
motivation. This quantiﬁcation is represented in terms of expectancy X value. While not
entirely absent, I noticed that Karen had low expectancy outcomes. That is, she believed
that Mrs. Jones did not like her and that it was difﬁcult to be successful in her class. I

also noticed that Karen often found little value in the much of the academic work (see

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chapter four).

Other variables could have also been used to explain the discrepancy between
efﬁcacy and performance outcomes. I noticed that the lack of declarative, procedural and
conditional knowledge could have also been used to explain the discrepancy between
efﬁcacy and outcomes. These assessments were based mainly on my observations and
little from Karen’s self-reported data. The purpose of mentioning these possibilities is to
illustrate the ways in which truth about Karen was supposed to be discerned. I was
working with Karen to guide her in making these calculations and evaluations. For the
intervention to have been successful Karen was expected to appropriate ways of
calculating, monitoring and documenting knowledge about her self. To develop a plan,
we had to be successful at saying something truthful about her self and her engagement.

For other psychological conditions, Karen was expected to do similar things.
After one week into the intervention began, I requested that Karen record her strengths
and weaknesses in her learning journal. According to the intervention, it was important
to solicit this information after one week. The authors of the intervention reasoned that
enough information would have been ascertained about one’s outcomes and one’s
Ieaming strategies that would enable one to form a link between study behavior and
academic outcomes. Calculating and documenting strengths and weaknesses were in
service of developing a set of goals that would provide the volition to improve academic
performance through cognitive and behavior modiﬁcation. The purpose of soliciting self-
perceptions of strengths and weaknesses was to develop a plan and set of goals to address
weaknesses and build off strengths to improve academic performance. If‘inaccurate

strengths, weaknesses and beliefs are not ascertained, then it could be difﬁcult to develop

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a plan. A plan for Karen depended on the accurate measurement of her thoughts, beliefs
and behaviors.

A major part of the intervention included knowing and articulating features of
psychological and behavioral functioning. For Karen to learn academic self-regulation,
recognition, calculation and articulation—either through a verbal speech act or textual
recording—was the ﬁrst step in an effort to regulate learning. Doing this served to
identify areas of thoughts, beliefs and behaviors that were problematic. It also served to
as a foundation for devising a plan alter areas that were problematic or help to overcome
those areas. With Karen, there were inaccurate measurements of psychological and
behavioral features. In addition, there was a general difﬁculty with calculating and
documenting her thoughts and behavior (see chapter four). Therefore, it was difﬁcult to

devise a comprehensive plan that would address problem areas.

Truth Telling and Coercion

In the previous section, I noted that for the SRL intervention there was the
expectation that Karen recognize and articulate truthful self knowledge. In this section, I
discuss two dimensions, what I have called here, truth telling and coercion. When I use
coercion, I do not mean it to have a strong connotation of force. Instead, I use it to
designate subtle ways of eliciting compliance. In relation to the SRL intervention, there
was a consistent and sustained effort to support certain ways of being in and seeing the
world. In this regard, there was recognition for some possibilities and the suppression of
others. I want to be careful not to suggest value for these different possibilities. Only, I

want to suggest that ways of telling the truth about oneself carries with it potential for

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dis/empowerment because of the suppression and production of possibilities. Another
feature of the relationship between coercion and truth telling had to do with efforts to
render Karen vulnerable to be controlled by stating who she was. In this part, I note that
being able to tell the truth about oneself could have made it possible to be controlled not

only by her self but also by others.

Speaking “a” Truth and Speaking “the” Truth
Truth. . .is always enthroned by acts of violence. It entails a social process of
exclusion in which arguments, evidence, theories and beliefs are thrust to the

margins, not allowed to enter ‘the true.’ (Rose, 1996, p.109)

This conversation could take the direction of considering the degree to which self-
efﬁcacy, strengths, weakness and goal orientation were mere constructions derived from
the psychological discourse or are pre-existing psychological conditions that merely
needed a language to articulate what was already in existence’. While this conversation
is important to engage, the outcome would do little to alter the fact that learning academic
self-regulation involved the recognition and articulation of certain psychological truths,
whether they existed or not before there was language to articulate them. As Rose (1996)
stated, the articulation of certain truths “entails a social process of exclusion.” In this
section, I have to imagine what possibilities for Karen was thrust to the margins as a
result of the intervention.

As noted in chapter four, Karen displayed patterns of dependency. These patterns

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were illustrated in consistent and frequent questions of how to begin, how to proceed and
how to ﬁnish. This pattern of dependency also played out in other instances. First,
Karen seldom worked on long-term assignments when I was not present. Often, when I
did not work with Karen after school, she did not do her homework. Aside from this
form of dependency, I noticed that Karen worked and performed well with academic task
when we collaborated, which included shared reading, discussions and lntemet research.
While dependency might not be the best label to assign to these proclivities and
behaviors, I used the notion here to point to the fact that these characteristics of Karen’s
performance compete with, what might be construed as, independence, which is a
commonly considered feature and condition of SRL. There were efforts to suppress those
proclivities that conﬂicted with the production of independence, which might include, but
was not limited to, initiating tasks, self-questioning, persistence with task engagement
and persistence while working alone. The effort to change these behaviors and
proclivities was one example of suppressing “dependency” and producing
“independency.”

The suppression and production of different possibilities is a good way to think
about SRL as dis/empowerment. ﬁrst, consider the importance for Karen to learn
academic independence. As I have noted in chapter ﬁve, Karen’s teacher relied on her
parents to help educate Karen and Karen’s parents relied on her teacher support Karen
with her struggles. I argued that these expectations contributed to a lack of support in
both home and school for academic betterment. For that reason, Ieaming to be

academically independent or self-sufﬁcient could have been quite beneﬁcial for Karen

 

3 Hacking (1996) would not dichotomize this conversation. He acknowledges the co-

185

because it could have helped her overcome the limitations in the contexts in which she
operated. In this way, I can see the efforts to use SRL in support of academic
independency as empowering.

There was another side to this. As I have mentioned, there was suppression of
ways of engagement, ones on which Karen relied and with which Karen was comfortable.
In some ways, Karen was obliged to beindependent. This obligation calls into question
“independence” as independence. First, if Karen had to depend on me to be independent,
then was she really being independent or extending her dependency? If she was obliged
to be independent the way I expected her to be, was she really being independent?

If the intervention worked as it was supposed, Karen would have been able to
work independently by evaluating and monitoring her beliefs, goals, strengths and
weaknesses and be able to effectively discern task demands and then be able to use the
necessarily Ieaming strategies to achieve goals. Rose (1996) helped me to consider the
way this brand of independence has another side to it. Rose (1996) wrote,

promises of self-assertion and self-control offer each of us access to those

qualities that ensured the success of these we envy. But these progressive

principles are double edged. They institute, as the other side of their promises of
autonomy and success, a constant self doubt, a constant scrutiny and evaluation of
how one performs, the construction of one’s personal part in social existence as

something to be calibrated and judged in it minute particulars” (p. 239).

In this quotation, Rose does not use the notion of independence. I associated the notions

of “self-assertion” and “self-control” to the kinds of independence supposed to be

 

construction of psychological phenomena.

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produced from the SRL intervention. Thus, if Karen did everything she was supposed to
then independence would have had the effect of providing Karen with self-control and
success. On the other side, Karen was obligated to be independent—both putting into
question the independence of independence and suppressing other possibilities for
engagement—and institute a constant self-scrutiny. In that way, Karen was supposed to
be tied to her identity, engaged in a constant effort of self-scrutiny. Also, consider that
Karen came to realize that her beliefs effect the outcomes of her life and that calculating,
monitoring and documenting these beliefs would bring her success. The belief
individuals have thecapacity to control the outcomes of their lives could produce a state
anxiety and self-doubt because the responsibility of one’s life is supposed to be perceived

as controllable by the individual.

Truth Telling and Control

As I noted in previous chapters, I experienced difﬁcultly with guiding and
shaping Karen’s calculation and documentation of her beliefs and behaviors. From this
perspective, I began to imagine what would have happened if I effectively elicited
Karen’s thoughts, beliefs and behaviors. What if Karen performed these functions well
by knowing and telling something truthful about her self? I began to consider that her
knowing and telling the truth about her self had the potential for me to be better at
guiding and shaping her thoughts and behavior. As suggested by social cognitive
theorists, understanding individuals’ personal truths through documentation and
calculation enables individuals to exercise better control over their droughts, beliefs and

behaviors (citations). I also see that these techniques of truth telling could have also

187

provided me with the tools to shape and guide Karen in ways that aligned her capacities

and conditions with goals of the school and goals of the intervention.

SRL as Truth Therapy

One complexity in educational psychology that has always interested me involved
the issue of the existence of psychological conditions without the discourse to describe it.
It might be thought that each person has self-efﬁcacy and those who understand and
attend to it are those who are better at exercising their agentic capabilities. So, once
individuals acquire the language and technical skills to measure self-efﬁcacy, they can do
something to control it. From the social cognitive perspective, it might be said that self-
efﬁcacy exists and is steering behavior, whether it is articulated or not. Identifying self-
efﬁcacy and its role in outcomes is liberating because such conscious awareness gives
control to the individual. This position is rooted in the social cognitive perspective of
SRL. Training and practice were supposed to help Karen discern “the” truth about her
self.

The question is: does this practice and training contribute to the construction of
psychological conditions, such as self-efﬁcacy, or is it designed to help individuals
discern some objective reality—that is, use language to describe what already existed? If
one believed that self-efﬁcacy existed and one only needed the language and technical
skills to discern and control it, then it is not difﬁcult to see SRL from a social cognitive
perspective as empowering. However, if one viewed the concept of self-efﬁcacy and the
techniques of measuring it as part of the construction of self-efﬁcacy, then it is possible

to see some of the limitations, constraints and obligations associated with self-efﬁcacy. I

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did not delve into this complexity because it did not alter the fact that Karen had to know
and tell truths about her self. Whether these truths were constructed or pre-existent,
Karen had to learn techniques to make her self intelligible in a particular way. I argued
that telling the truth about her self simultaneously opened and closed possibilities,
illustrating the conceptual nuance of the SRL as dis/empowering.

It was also interesting to consider the relationship between the SRL intervention
and a form of truth therapy. SRL is treated as a form of individual betterment.
Researchers have contended that SRL is not only beneﬁcial for academic learning in
institutions, but it is good for lifelong learning and democratic participation. While this

might be the case, truth therapies are tied to techniques of coercion and control.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I suggested that from a critical postmodern perspective, SRL could
be seen as simultaneously empowering and disempowering. I represented this feature of
SRL using the signiﬁer dis/empowerment. I considered ways that SRL ways
dis/empowering by illuminating ways it could increase and decrease autonomy from
authority and close and open up possibilities for choice and identity. Pointing out these
features of SRL helps to develop a nuanced understanding of it as it related to Karen’s
experience. Viewing SRL as empowering is one part of the story. If that is the only part
that researchers and teachers are considering, it could happen that the effects of
constructing a SRL subject, measuring students by this construction and trying to teach
SRL could ignore the harmful effects on students.

In the ﬁrst section, I focused on the way pedagogy that was designed to foster

189

SRL was guided by attempts to support self-advocacy, produce responsibility and
improve Ieaming strategy use. I noted that as part of these efforts there were obligations
to be a certain way and engage with academic tasks in a certain way. Karen struggled
with these obligations and the expectation that she fulﬁll these obligations led to
disadvantages. While there are certain ethical considerations for SRL, there were certain
practical one’s as well.

In the second section, a similar observation about obligation and struggle could be
discerned. Karen was expected to develop accurate knowledge about her self, including
beliefs, thoughts and behaviors. She was expected to use a variety of instrument to
calculate and document, amongst other things, her self-efﬁcacy. Developing this truth
was supposed to support better control over her self. I wanted to show that developing
this knowledge of the self had parallels to the idea of truth therapy, which could be
understand as using the instruments to tell the truth about one self in order to make one
self better. Similar to the teacher’s efforts to make Karen a better learner and more

responsible and caring person, Karen Struggled with these obligations.

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Chapter 7

Conclusion

Based on the deﬁnition with which I began the dissertation, Karen was not self-
regulating her learning before, during, or after the intervention. Towards the end of the
research study, I noticed increased motivation for writing, but mostly in cooperative
situations in which she and I shared the cognitive load. Also during these times of
increased motivation, mainly with writing, I noticed that Karen began to initiate tasks,
sustain effort and display some enjoyment during task engagement. Arguably, the
increase in motivation to initiate tasks and the increased satisfaction associated with the
tasks was a result of the integration of computer technology. I did not observe that Karen
monitored and evaluated her thinking, behavior and environment, even with my prompts
to do so.

From this research, I am not suggesting the self-regulated Ieaming (SRL) could
not have worked for Karen. I tried my best to support the regulation of her Ieaming and
the dissertation allowed me to see that for Karen, there were a number of complexities
associated with teaching her to regulate her Ieaming. Each perspective from which I
drew allowed me to see different things related to teaching SRL. In this chapter, I focus
on how Karen’s experience with the intervention illuminated some of the pedagogical

complexities associated with teaching SRL.

Social Cognitive

From the social cognitive perspective, I considered the difﬁculties with teaching

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Karen to be efﬁcacious, difﬁculties that competed with efforts to increase efﬁcacy. I
wanted to show that there were certain pedagogical complexities associated with the
assumptions associated with the intervention. In addition, the teacher also made
pedagogical decisions that competed with my efforts to increase Karen’s self-efficacy.
Some of her decisions competed overall with the goals and strategies of the intervention.
The conﬂict between the intervention and the teacher’s pedagogy could be located in a
broader conversation about the necessary conditions for learning academic self-
regulation. The implications of the conﬂict between the teacher’s pedagogical strategies

and the intervention will be discussed.

Intervention

For Karen, strategies to support efﬁcacy to both regulate learning and perform
speciﬁc academic tasks competed with my efforts to increase efficacy. For example,
regulating learning involved developing an awareness of self-efﬁcacy. In order to
monitor and evaluate self-efﬁcacy, Karen had to appropriate a new language and in doing
so relate to herself in new ways. This new language was supposed to provide Karen with
the tools to achieve a heightened self-awareness. Karen had to learn new behaviors,
techniques of relating to her self and language to relate to her self In this way, SRL
became another form of content to learn. While researchers have argued that learning
these new techniques of relating to the self are necessary to make “smart” learners
(Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach, 1996), the additional content to be learned increased
Karen’s learning burden and made it difﬁth to experience success with self-regulation

and academic content.

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Teacher’s Pedagogy

Mrs. Jones had her ideas about the kinds of engagement that she wanted to
cultivate in Karen. In her effort to cultivate responsibility, Mrs. Jones administered
punishments on assignments by lowering Karen’s grades for not submitting certain
instruments required for the assignment. Working hard on her assignments, it was
difficult for Karen to associate hard work with success. It was difficult for her to
experience success. Lowering Karen’s grade for not submitting instruments happened on
three occasions on assignments that were more heavily weighted. Because the
assignments were more heavily weighted, Karen not only received a lowered grade on
those assignments, but also received an overall lowered grade in the subject. Mrs. Jones’
actions competed with my efforts to increase Karen’s self-efﬁcacy and help her associate
hard work with success.

Requiring SRL instruments not only competed with efficacy, it also competed
with overall SRL. The SRL instruments were well deﬁned, homogenized instruments
that all students needed to use. I would argue that the instruments alignment with some
versions of SRL but they did not provide the ﬂexibility that Karen needed to regulate her
learning. Mrs. Jones’ SRL instruments undermined my trying to teach Karen to evaluate
tasks and employ appropriate strategies and develop tools to complete those tasks.

There were two different approaches to fostering SRL. Mrs. Jones focused on
discipline; she required Karen to use SRL instruments and administered punishments for
failing to complete and submit those instruments. The approach I took had to do with

giving Karen the opportunities to learn self-regulation by practicing self-regulated; she

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was given the opportunity to experiment with strategies and develop her own tools to
regulate her Ieaming. There was a conﬂict between these approaches that as I have noted

led to difficulties with increasing self-efﬁcacy and SRL.

Concerted Cultivation

Making this observation leads me to consider the degree to which concerted
cultivation was necessary for Karen to develop into a self-regulated Ieamer. That is, was
it necessary for Karen’s teacher, her parents and me to agree on outcomes and strategies
and then contribute to the realization of those outcomes? Zimmerman (1998) argued that
Ieaming academic self-regulation required a concerted effort between parents, coaches,
teachers and other adults in a child’s life. For Karen, there was a misalignment between
pedagogical strategies coming from her teacher, her parents and me. If I conclude that
Karen could have developed into self-regulated learner with a concerted effort between
her parents, teachers, coaches and me, then there are a number of social and cultural

implications.

Sociology

As I have noted, engaging in concerted cultivation of certain talents, skills and
dispositions has been identiﬁed as part of middle class child rearing practices (Lareau,
2003). I observed that Karen’s parents, who I have identiﬁed as part of a working class,
did not engage in concerted cultivation of skills and dispositions related to SRL. I
observed that Karen’s parents did not model SRL strategies in the home. There are a few

reasons I suggest might have contributed to the absence of modeling in the home.

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Occupational conditions required little use of SRL and, if at times it did, there were stark
boundaries between what happened at work and what happened at home. Both parents
struggled as learners and worked little with Karen on how to be a strategic learner. The
few times that I observed Francisco working with Karen, there was more of a
preoccupation with product over process. Francisco was more concerned with the
completion of the task and therefore, took more of the responsibility for completing the
task. Their experience in schools, both as students and parents, were limited. As I have
noted in chapter ﬁve, Karen’s parents expected the teacher to teach Karen to be
successful in school.

The use of technology in the home, to me, communicated the most substantial
inﬂuence on SRL development. I stated that parents had limited understanding of the
potential of technology to foster both learning and SRL. As I have noted, the
introduction of computer technology led to different types of engagement for Karen.
According to Laura, the use of computer technology was seen as playing a game. The
suggestion here was that learning was not really happening.

For Karen’s parents to engage in concerted cultivation in skills and dispositions
for SRL certain social and cultural conditions needed to be in place. The teacher
expected parents to engage in concerted efforts. To her, there was little understanding of
this social and cultural demand. Mrs. Jones believed that Karen’s parents did not value
education, a myth that Lareau (1989/2000) tried to dispel about working class parents.
Karen’s parents valued her education. Mrs. Jones expected the parents to engage in
concerted cultivation and her treatment of Karen was inﬂuenced by the perceived lack of

concerted cultivation. Mrs. Jones provided less feedback and spent less time on a draft of

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Karen’s magazine article. She spent more time and gave more attention to other
students’ papers who she stated have parents who complain about grades. Feedback is
key for SRL development and so, providing different degrees of elaboration and detail to
children who have parents who employ a particular child rearing practice created
different prospects for SRL.

I am suggesting that Karen might have had more success if there were concerted
efforts to foster skills and dispositions to regulate learning. However, that would have
implied not only making changes in Karen’s goal orientation, but also making changes to
the lifestyle of the family. Considering these conditions from a sociological perspective,
I was able to see that the need to foster SRL using concerted efforts meant changing the
habits, dispositions, knowledge, and beliefs of both Karen and her parents. Requiring a
concerted effort to foster SRL not only added additional cognitive burdens for Karen, it

also added social and cultural burdens as well.

Critical Postmodern

From a critical postmodern perspective, I considered different pedagogical
complexities associated with teaching SRL, ones that consider the ethical side teaching it.
I considered ways that instruction designed to foster SRL increased and decreased
autonomy from authority and closed and opened up possibilities for choice and identity,
what I described as dis/empowerment. To continue from the previous sections, if
successful SRL required that Karen and her parents change their dispositions and child
rearing practices to match what has been identiﬁed as part of middle class habitus, then it

was possible for me to see the dis/empowering features of pedagogy designed to teach

196

 

SRL.

From a sociological perspective, it could be argued that Karen was operating in
two different cultural spheres (see chapter ﬁve): home and school. SRL required Karen
to adopt thoughts and practices that were distant from home. These thoughts, behaviors
and beliefs were supposed to dispel thoughts, beliefs and desires connected to home.
Adopting these thoughts were supposed to be made possible by Karen telling the truth
about her self. The authors of the intervention suggested that individuals needed to
develop accurate self-knowledge, which included knowledge of beliefs, doubts, fears,
behaviors and the impact that behavior has on environments and vice versa, by
calculating and documenting certain features of their academic functioning.

There were two ways in which I saw this pedagogy expectation as
dis/empowering. Studying her self and developing this accurate self-knowledge, in
theory, was supposed to lead to a better sense of control. Even though Karen did not
learn to study her self, at least not through the techniques of calculation and
documentation, I could see how Ieaming these techniques make certain things possible. I
could see how becoming a studier of her self using calculation and documentation
potentially free one, or at least generate the illusion of freeing, of habit, environmental
determinism and emotional constraints.

I also saw the way writing of the self in a way that made SRL possible involved
coercion and obligation. There was a narrowness of the truth and the mechanisms in
place to tell this truth. From a sociological perspective, it could be argued that
calculating and documenting thoughts, beliefs, behaviors and desires in general, but also

in the way expected for SRL, was not part of, what Lareau, called the “habitus of

197

everyday” for Karen. Evidence suggested that Karen did not relate to or understand her
self in terms of self-efﬁcacy, goal orientation, see herself as someone who was capable of
changing her self and the environment to achieve academic success, nor someone who
was of two minds suppressing or altering current thoughts, beliefs or practices in service
of academic success. In chapter ﬁve, I suggested that her current way of relating to her
self was connected to her family, who I identiﬁed as working class.

To summarize, I considered the possibility that teaching SRL needed to involve a
concerted effort because Karen’s teacher, parents and I all had different expectations for
outcomes and means to achieve outcomes. These different expectations were at times
competing and contradictory. Concerted cultivation requires an alignment between home
and school practices. What I saw in this research study was that the parents were mostly
expected to change their dispositions, knowledge and practices in order to create this
alignment. The expectations for change required that Karen and her parents adopt
different cultural, social and cognitive practices. I discussed how these expectations are
good examples of the way teaching SRL could be dis/empowering. Karen and her
parents were expected to change to adapt to already existing conditions. While devaluing
cultural and social practices and maintaining the status quo, such adaptation could have
made navigation in particular spheres more ﬂuid.

Another complexity associated with this one had to with the degree to which SRL
was a Ieaming gimmick or a disposition. For Karen, SRL was more than a gimmick. I
do not use gimmick with a negative connotation. I use it signify the degree to which
SRL involved widespread self-transformations and the degree to which it involved the

acquisition and employment learning strategies. An example of the latter is from Harris,

198

 

Graham, Mason and Friedlander (2008). The authors suggested that teachers should use
a number of mnemonics, such as POW (pick an idea, organize notes and write and say
more) and WW (who, when and where), for struggling writers. There is a difference
between Ieaming to employ a strategy and developing mental control in order to
transforming dispositions, beliefs and behaviors. While learning strategies was an
important feature of the intervention, there was the expectation of engaging in ways quite
different from what Karen was used to. I suggest that the differences in Karen’s primary
and secondary discourses contributed to the need alterations in dispositions. For Karen,
SRL was more than the acquisition of Ieaming strategies.

I was hoping not to present a negative depiction of SRL, only to point out some of
the complexities and nuances of SRL that need to be considered in order for teachers to
better understand the ethical and practical implications of fostering SRL. This was a case
study and the results cannot be generalized. However, I think this work could still inform
both teachers and researchers of SRL understanding of some of the pedagogical
dimensions of SRL that I explored in this dissertation. As I hope my analysis suggests,

SRL is complex and different features of it look different from different perspectives.

Future Research

From this research, I would be interested in further exploring the relationship
between socioeconomic class and SRL. It is difﬁcult to make a substantial claim that the
kinds of engagement associated with SRL are ones that are associated with middle class
child rearing practices and its effects. Even for Lareau (2003) who studied multiple

families, such general claims are difﬁcult to make. Still, I would like to conduct a study

199

 

 

that includes children and their families from different class backgrounds and consider
the relationship between different values, beliefs, dispositions and practices and SRL. As
a feature of this. study, I would like to consider perceptions of teachers towards children
form different class backgrounds. I wonder if teacher’s perceptions of students as self-
regulated connected to class. That is, are children who come from middle class

backgrounds more often associate with self-regulated Ieaming?

200

 

 

APPENDICES

201

 

APPENDIX A

Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ)

Please rate the following items based on your behavior in your classes. Your rating should be

on a 7-point scale where l= not at all true of me to 7=very true of me.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

true

1. I prefer class work that is challenging so I can learn new things
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
2. If I study in appropriate ways, then I will be able to learn the classroom material.
I 2 3 4 5 6 7
3. Compared with other students in this class I expect to do well
I 2 3 4 5 6 7
4. I am so nervous during a test that I cannot remember facts I have learned
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
5. It is important for me to learn what is being taught in class
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
6. I like what I am Ieaming in school
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
7. I’m certain I can understand the ideas taught in these subjects
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8. I think I will be able to use what I learn in these subjects area for other subject
areas
I 2 3 4 5 6 7

9. I expect to do very well in these subjects

202

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
10. Compared with others in this class, I think I’m a good student
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
II. I believe I could understand complicated ideas in these subjects
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
12. I am sure I can do an excellent job on the problems and tasks assigned for these
subjects
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
13. I have an uneasy, upset feeling when I take a test
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
14. I think I will receive a good grade for these subjects
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
15. Even when I do poorly on a test I try to learn from my mistakes
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
16. I think that what I am learning in these classes is useful for me to know
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
17. My study skills are excellent compared with others in this class
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
18. I think that what we are learning in this class is interesting
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
19. Compared with other students in this class I think I know a great deal about the

subjects

203

20. I know that I will be able to learn the material for this class
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
21. I worry a great deal about tests
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
22. Understanding this subject is important to me
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
23. When I take a test I think about how poorly I am doing
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
24. When I study for a test, I try to put together the information from class and ﬁ'om
the book
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
25. When I do homework, I try to remember what the teacher said in class so I can
answer the questions correctly
1 2 3 4 5 6 , 7
26. I ask myself questions to make sure I know the material I have been studying
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 '
27. It is hard for me to decide what the main ideas are in what I read
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
28. When work is hard I either give up or study only the easy parts
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
29. When I study I put important ideas into my own words
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

30. I always try to understand what the teacher is saying even if it doesn’t make sense

204

 

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

l 2 3 4 5 6 7
When I study for a test I try to remember as many facts as I can
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
When studying, I copy my notes over to help me remember material
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
I work on practice exercises and answer end of chapter questions even when I
don’t have to
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Even when study materials are dull and uninteresting, I keep working until I ﬁnish
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
When I study for a test I practice saying the important facts over and over to
myself
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Before I begin studying I think about the things I will need to do to learn
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
I use what I have learned from old homework assignments and the textbook to do
new assignments
l 2 3 4 , 5 6 7
I often ﬁnd that I have been reading for class but don’t know what it is all about
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
I ﬁnd that when the teacher is talking I think of other things and don’t really listen
to what is being said

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

205

40. When I am studying a topic, I try to make everything ﬁt together
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
41. When I’m reading I stop once in a while and go over what I have read
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
42. When I read materials for this class, I say the words over and over to myself to
help me remember
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
43. I outline the chapters in my book to help me study
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
44. I work hard to get a good grade even when I don’t like a class
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
45. When reading I try to connect the things I am reading about with what I already

know.

206

 

 

APPENDIX B

Teacher Interview Protocol

1. What can you tell me about [student] academic performance?
2. What are [student] grades?
a. Have they improved, remained stable or worsened over time?
3. What are some strategies used to teach [student]?
4. How does [student] interact with others?
5. Does the [student] participate in group activities?
6. What can you tell me about [student] behaviors?
7. What are some attitudes expressed by [student]?
a. Attitude towards subject?
b. Attitude towards classroom activities?
c. Attitude towards peers?
8. Does [student] understand the content?
a. To what degree is [student] understanding content?
i. Has [student] mastered the content?
ii. Is [student] understanding small portions?
iii. Is [student] having trouble understanding?
b. What have strategies have been used to address [student] understanding?
9. Does [student] need to be prompts to get started with work?
10. Does [student] need reminders to stay on task?

a. If so, can you describe the setting for some of those times?

207

11. Does [student] listen during lectures?

a. If not, what are some things [student] does during lectures?
12. Does [student] ask many questions?

a. What kinds of questions? Can you provide an example?

b. When are they asked?
13. Are there times when [student] expresses frustration?

a. When? Can you provide an example(s)?

b. How has [student] dealt with that frustration?
14. Has [student] undergone any testing related to academic performance?
15. Does [student] receive special services ﬁ'om school?

a. If so, what services?

b. If not, from what services might [student] beneﬁt?

Follow-up Interviews
These interviews will be shorter and comprised of questions designed to assess the
academic beneﬁt of the intervention. I propose to conduct them once every two weeks a

at the teacher’s convenience.

Questions
1. Have you seen any changes in [student] behavior? If so, please describe.
2. Have you seen any changes in [student] academic performance? If so, please

describe.

208

 

. Have you seen any changes in [student] attitudes towards school? If so, please
describe

. Have you seen any changes in [student] interaction with peers? If so, please
describe.

. Has [student] been initiating Ieaming by asking questions for clariﬁcation?

. Does [student] need to be reminded to stay on task?

. Has [student] understanding of content changed? If so, in what ways?

. Do you see an improvement in [student] overall performance in school?

. What do you see as the biggest improvement in [student] performance?

209

APPENDIX C

Initial Child Interview Protocol

1.How would you describe your approach to completing homework?
2. How would you describe your thinking before starting homework?
a. Do you set goals?
b. Do you plan?
c. Do you allocate certain amounts of time to certain tasks?
3. How would you describe your performance in school
4. What subjects are difﬁcult for you?
5. What subjects are you doing poorly in?
6. Why do you think you are doing poorly in those subjects?
7. How often do you ask the teacher for help?
8. How often do you ask people at home for help?
9. Are there times when you need help on assignments?

a. What do you do during those times?

210

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211

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