Effects of Internal and External Conditions on Strategies of Self-regulated Learning: A Learning Analytics Study

Abstract

Self-regulated learning (SRL) skills are essential for successful learning in a technology-enhanced learning environment. Learning Analytics techniques have shown a great potential in identifying and exploring SRL strategies from trace data in various learning environments. However, these strategies have been mainly identified through analysis of sequences of learning actions, and thus interpretation of the strategies is heavily task and context dependent. Further, little research has been done on the association of SRL strategies with different influencing factors or conditions. To address these gaps, we propose an analytic method for detecting SRL strategies from theoretically supported SRL processes and applied the method to a dataset collected from a multi-source writing task. The detected SRL strategies were explored in terms of their association with the learning outcome, internal conditions (prior-knowledge, metacognitive knowledge and motivation) and external conditions (scaffolding). The study results showed our analytic method successfully identified three theoretically meaningful SRL strategies. The study results revealed small effect size in the association between the internal conditions and the identified SRL strategies, but revealed a moderate effect size in the association between external conditions and the SRL strategy use.