Cognitive behavior approaches and self-regulation:
Introduction
Operant conditioning spawned applications and other real-world settings, and the interest in cognitive behavior approaches has also produced such applications. In the fifth century , the Chinese philosopher Confucius said, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” As you read about the cognitive behavior approaches and self-regulation, you will discover that they reflect Confucius’ simple expression.
1-Cognitive Behavior Approaches:
-In the cognitive behavior approaches, the emphasis is on getting students to monitor, manage, and regulate their own behavior rather than letting it be controlled by external factors. this has been called cognitive behavior modification.
-Cognitive behavior approaches stem from both cognitive psychology, with its
emphasis on the effects of thoughts on behavior, and behaviorism, with its emphasis on techniques for changing behavior.
cognitive behavior approaches try to change students’ misconceptions, strengthen their coping skills, increase their self-control, and encourage constructive self-reflection.
Cognitive behavior techniques:
Ø Self-instructional methods:
Are cognitive behavior techniques aimed at teaching individuals to modify their own behavior by talking to themselves in positive ways.
Following are some self-talk strategies that students and teachers can use to cope more effectively with stressful situations such as preparing to take a test.
1- Prepare for anxiety or stress.
-“What do I have to do?” “I’m going to develop a plan to deal with it.” “I’ll just think about what I have to do.” “I won’t worry. Worry doesn’t help anything.” “I have a lot of different strategies I can use.”
2- Confront and handle the anxiety or stress.
-“I can meet the challenge.” “I’ll keep on taking just one step at a time.” “I can handle it. I’ll just relax, breathe deeply, and use one of the strategies.” “I won’t think about my stress. I’ll just think about what I have to do.”
3- Cope with feelings at critical moments.
-What is it I have to do?” “I knew my anxiety might increase. I just have to keep myself in control.” “When the anxiety comes, I’ll just pause and keep focusing on what I have to do.”
4-Use reinforcing self-statements.
“Good, I did it.” “I handled it well.” “I knew I could do it.” “Wait until I tell other people how I did it!”
The strategy is simply to replace negative self-statements with
positive ones.
For example, a student might say to herself, “I’ll never get this work done by tomorrow.” This can be replaced with positive self-statements such as these: “This is going to be tough, but I think I can do it.” “I’m going to look at this as a challenge rather than a stressor.” “If I work really hard, I might be able to get it done.”
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For Example
You think you can’t do it, and so you don’t. If negative self-talk is a problem for you, at random times during the day ask yourself, “What am I saying to myself right now?” Moments that you expect will be potentially stressful are excellent times to examine your self-talk. Also monitor your students’ self-talk. If you hear students saying, “I can’t do this” or “I’m so slow I’ll never get this done,” spend some time getting them to replace their negative self-talk with positive self-talk.
Ø Self-monitoring
Cognitive behaviorists recommend that students improve their performance by monitoring their own behavior.
Such monitoring can involve getting students to keep charts or records of their behavior.
Teachers can get students to do some similar monitoring of their own progress by getting them to keep records
of how many assignments they have finished, how many books they have read, how many homework papers they have turned in on time, how many days in a row they have not interrupted the teacher, and so on. In some cases, teachers place these self-monitoring charts on the walls of the classroom.
Alternatively, if the teacher thinks that negative social comparison with other students will be highly stressful for some students, then a better strategy might be to have students keep private records (in an notebook, for example) that are periodically checked by the teacher.
Ø Self-Regulation:
Definition:
-Self-regulatory learning consists of the self-generation and self-monitoring of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in order to reach a goal. These goals might be academic (improving comprehension while reading, becoming a more organized writer, learning how to do multiplication, asking relevant questions) or they might be
socio-emotional (controlling one’s anger, getting along better with peers).
As children become older, their capacity for self-regulation increases . The increased capacity in self-regulation is linked to developmental advances in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
Self-regulatory learners do the following :
● Set goals for extending their knowledge and sustaining their motivation
● Are aware of their emotional makeup and have strategies for managing their Emotions.
● periodically monitor their progress toward a goal
● Fine-tune or revise their strategies based on the progress they are making
● Evaluate obstacles that may arise and make the necessary adaptations
-Self-regulation is an important aspect of school readiness. In a recent study, children who could regulate their emotions effectively in early childhood had better math and literacy scores in the early elementary school years than their counterparts who had poor emotion regulation.
Researchers also have found that high-achieving students are often self-regulatory learners .
For example, compared with low-achieving students, high-achieving students set more specific learning goals, use more strategies to learn, self-monitor their learning more, and more systematically evaluate their progress toward a goal. In one study of adolescents from low-income families, a higher level of self-regulation was linked to higher achievement and better grades.
Barry Zimmerman, Sebastian Bonner, and Robert Kovach (1996)
developed a model for turning low-self-regulatory students into students who engage in these multistep strategies:
1) Self-evaluation and monitoring.
(2) Goal setting and strategic planning.
(3) Putting a plan into action and monitoring it.
(4) Monitoring outcomes and refining strategies.
Zimmerman and colleagues describe a seventh-grade student who is doing poorly in history and apply their self-regulatory model to her situation.
This process of self-regulation happens in three steps:
Planning: The learners analyze the task for value and level of difficulty, identify appropriate learning strategies, and set academic goals, outlines strategies to tackle the task, and/or create a schedule for the task. Student examines their self-efficacy beliefs, and predict outcome expectancies.
Monitoring: In this stage, the student puts her plans into action and closely monitors her performance and her experience with the methods she chose.
Reflection: Finally, after the task is complete and the results are in, the student reflects on how well she did and why she performed the way she did. (Zimmerman, 2002).
In step 1, she self-evaluates her studying and test preparation by keeping a detailed record of them. The teacher gives her some guidelines for keeping these records. After several weeks, the student turns the records in and traces her poor test performance to low comprehension of difficult reading material.
In step 2, the student sets a goal, in this case of improving reading comprehension, and plans how to achieve the goal. The teacher assists her in breaking the goal into components, such as locating main ideas and setting specific goals for understanding a series of paragraphs in her textbook. The teacher also provides the student with strategies, such as focusing initially on the first sentence of each paragraph and then scanning the others as a means of identifying main ideas. Another support the teacher might offer the student if available is adult or peer tutoring in reading comprehension.
In step 3, the student puts the plan into action and begins to monitor her progress. Initially, she may need help from the teacher or tutor in identifying main ideas in the reading. This feedback can help her monitor her reading comprehension more effectively on her own.
In step 4, the student monitors her improvement in reading comprehension by
evaluating whether it has had any impact on her learning outcomes. Most importantly, has her improvement in reading comprehension led to better performance on history tests?
Factors affecting on self regulation:
1-Modeling.
Consider how modeling can be an effective strategy for building self-regulatory skills and self-efficacy in improving reading and writing in Zimmerman’s four-phase model . Among the self-regulatory skills that models can engage in are planning and managing time effectively, attending to and concentrating, organizing and coding information strategically, establishing a productive work environment, and using social resources.
For example, students might observe a teacher engage in an effective time management strategy and verbalize appropriate principles. By observing such
Models, students can come to believe that they also can plan and manage time effectively, which creates a sense of self-efficacy for academic self-regulation and motivates students to engage in those activities.
2- Self-efficacy: mentioned this before
Strategies for Encouraging Students to Be Self-Regulated Learners:
1. Gradually guide students to become self-regulated learners.
2. Make the classroom learning experience challenging and interesting for students.
When students are bored and uninterested in learning, they are less likely to become self-regulated learners. Instead of giving students one particular book to read, providing them with a choice from a variety of interesting books is likely to encourage their motivation to read.
Giving students choices increases students’personal investment in their learning and increases their self-regulation .
3. Give students opportunities to experience the type of activities recommended by Zimmerman and his colleagues.
That is, create projects for students in which they self-evaluate their current learning, set a goal to improve their learning and plan how to reach the goal, put the plan into action and monitor their progress toward the goal, and monitor the outcome and refine their strategies. Monitor students’ progress through these steps and encourage their ability to engage in these learning activities independently. Provide scaffolding only as needed.
1. Model self-regulated learning.
Verbalize effective self-regulation strategies for students, and tell them how you use self-regulation in your learning.
2. Make sure that students don’t just self-regulate but combine self-regulation with effective strategies for learning.
Students can self-regulate all they want, but if they don’t have the “know-how,” their self-regulation is unlikely to be beneficial.
Critics of the social cognitive approaches:
1-Some cognitive theorists point out that the approaches still focus too much on overt behavior and external factors and not enough on the details of how cognitive processes such as thinking, memory, and problem solving actually take place.
2-Some develop mentalists criticize them for being non-developmental, in the sense that they don’t specify age-related, sequential changes in learning. It is true that social cognitive theory does not address development in great depth because it is mainly a theory of learning and social behavior. But labeling it as non-developmental is not accurate.
3-Humanistic theorists fault social cognitive theorists for not placing enough attention on self-esteem and caring, supportive relationships.
4-The theory assumes that changes in the environment will automatically lead to changes in the person, when this may not always be true.
5-The theory heavily focuses on processes of learning and in doing so disregards biological and hormonal predispositions that may influence behaviors.
References
Santrock J. Educational Psychology. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 2011, 2009, 2004, 2001.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, p.22.
Woolfolk ,A (2016).Educational psychology,part II Social cognitive view of learning p.p(436-460) Hong kong.
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