How can schools boost students’ self-regulation?  

A new generation of alternative schools — schools and programs that re-engage dropouts or students who aren’t on track to a high school diploma — has demonstrated the power of helping students practice the self-regulation skills they need to succeed. These schools foster and honor the resilience of students, while recognizing the academic and socioemotional challenges many of them face, often as a result of high-poverty backgrounds. 

A striking convergence of research, documentation, commentary, and policy in the past five years strongly suggests that an almost exclusive focus on academic knowledge and skills is an incomplete solution. Additional behaviors, skills, and mind-sets — sometimes called metacognitive skills or 21st-century skills — are just as necessary for academic and career success and a rich civic life. A significant body of research emphasizes that a focus on these mind-sets and skills contributes to improved outcomes on many academic measures, while their absence contributes to inefficient learning (Toshalis & Nakkula, 2012; Conley, 2012; Farrington et al., 2012). One of the most critical of these metacognitive skills is self-regulation. A self-regulating learner can “plan, set goals, organize, self-monitor, and self-evaluate at various points during the process [of building new knowledge or skills]” (Zimmerman, 1990).