Lernbiographien und selbstreguliertes Lernen: Eine narrative Studie mit ehemaligen Gymnasiastinnen und Gymnasiasten / Learning Biographies and Self-Regulated Learning: A Narrative Inquiry with Former Upper Secondary Students

In the past number of years, the upper secondary schools in the canton of Zurich have seen a major development initiative, launched by the canton’s department for upper secondary and vocational education (Mittelschul- und Berufsbildungsamt des Kantons Zürich, MBA), and aimed at establishing self-regulated learning (SRL) in the classroom.
The promotion of SRL is based on the assumption that it helps students acquire skills that are pivotal to lifelong learning and, more specifically, required to successfully complete academic studies. There is a considerable body of research about the effects of SRL on academic achievement at all levels of the education system. By contrast, to our knowledge, there is a dearth of empirical studies about whether and in what ways previous experiences with SRL in upper secondary school influence students’ views on learning in general, and their learning practices in university in particular.
Adopting a qualitative and reconstructive approach, the present study addresses these questions: On the basis of narrative interviews (see e.g. Rosenthal 2011; Schütze 1983), learning biographies of actual university students who all experienced prolonged sequences of SRL during upper secondary school will be reconstructed using the documentary method (see Bohnsack 2010). In doing so, this explorative research seeks to generate case-based insights into what ‘learning’ meant to the students over the course of their school career and while studying at university, the ways they dealt with situations of self-regulated learning while in school, and the significance they give to self-regulated learning within their narratives of learning. To this day, the literature on SRL is mostly focused on questions of instructional design, teacher behaviour, and learning outcomes. The present study aims at broadening the scope by providing deeper insights into the perspective of learners.

Publikation

Wolfensberger, Balz; Piniel, Jolanda; Kyburz-Graber, Regula; Canella, Claudia (2017). Selbstreguliertes Lernen: Orientierungsrahmen von Studierenden im Rückblick auf ihre Gymnasialzeit. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 63(2):225-244.