Effects of Technological Interventions for Self-regulation: A Control Experiment in Learnersourcing

Abstract

The benefits of incorporating scaffolds that promote strategies of self-regulated learning (SRL) to help student learning are widely studied and recognised in the literature. However, the best methods for incorporating them in educational technologies and empirical evidence about which scaffolds are most beneficial to students are still emerging. In this paper, we report our findings from conducting an in-the-field controlled experiment with 797 post-secondary students to evaluate the impact of incorporating scaffolds for promoting SRL strategies in the context of assisting students in creating novel content, also known as learnersourcing. The experiment had five conditions, including a control group that had access to none of the scaffolding strategies for creating content, three groups each having access to one of the scaffolding strategies (planning, externally-facilitated monitoring and self-assessing) and a group with access to all of the aforementioned scaffolds. The results revealed that the addition of the scaffolds for SRL strategies increased the complexity and effort required for creating content, were not positively assessed by learners and led to slight improvements in the quality of the generated content. We discuss the implications of our findings for incorporating SRL strategies in educational technologies.