1. 7/22/2018 5:51 AM
Self-regulated learning of students: The role of emotions and metacognition
Anastasia Efklides
Professor emerita
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Keynote lecture at the 2017 conference of the International Research Association
For Talent Development, Dubai, The Emirates, 6-9 October 2017
© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries.
The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

2. Introduction This presentation focuses on metacognition and affect
and their interaction in the context of Self-Regulated Learning (SRL), with particular emphasis on gifted or talented youth.
Research on gifted youth has only recently started to study Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) (see Stoeger and her collaborators).

3. Introduction
The question is to what extent gifted students self-regulate their learning and whether SRL promotes performance but also the well-being of students.
To answer these questions we need to unveil the possible mechanisms that underlie SRL.

4. Definitional issues: Giftedness
When talking about giftedness or talent I mean exceptional or superior cognitive ability in a domain that has potential for unique and valuable contributions.
There are different domains of giftedness:
Academic

5. Definitional issues: Giftedness
Arts-sports

6. Talents
creative

7. Talents
social

8. Introduction: SRL
SRL is a process that characterizes successful and autonomous learning. That is, students set their learning goals and learning agenda because they want to do it and not because they have to.
The students out of personal interest or task demands:
Initiate learning behaviors,
Set goals,
Plan their action,
Monitor their progress and check the execution of their plans
Make control decisions and use strategies, and
Evaluate learning outcomes

9. Introduction: SRL and the gifted
Why is it important for gifted students to self-regulate their learning?
From a cognitive point of view, there is no doubt that deliberate practice is crucial for the development of one’s potential or talent (the 10,000 hours rule; Ericsson et al., 1993).
But why is it that some students exert effort and bloom whereas others do not?
SRL entails that practice originates from one’s self, is in harmony with one’s talents and priorities, and is effectively regulated to achieve one’s learning goals.

10. Introduction: SRL and the gifted
There is encouraging evidence that interventions aiming to teach SRL to young gifted students
enhance the use of strategies (ecological, cognitive, metacognitive)
and
have positive impact on learning performance (Stoeger, Fleischman, & Obergriesser, 2015).
This is important because gifted students often complain that they have difficulty in time management and study habits (Conejeros-Solar et al., 2015).

11. Introduction: SRL an the gifted
The effects of SRL interventions on self-efficacy and anxiety for gifted underachievers are less pronounced (Obergriesser & Stoeger, 2015).
These findings underscore the need for more research on SRL in the gifted but also for a richer conceptualization of SRL that includes affect.

12. a complex and dynamic process
Introduction: SRL
My conceptualization of SRL is that it is
a complex and dynamic process
that involves
cognitive metacognitive
motivational and affective
factors
These components interact between them and with the learning task and situational factors to determine learning behavior.

13. Introduction In what follows I shall present
The Metacognitive and Affective model of SRL (MASRL) (Efklides, 2011) that posits interactions between cognition, metacognition, motivation, and affect
Some of the mechanisms underlying SRL such as feedback loops, fluency in processing, and interactions of affect and metacognition
Evidence on interactions of motivation, emotions, and
metacognition
4. Discuss the implications for gifted and talented persons

14. Definitional issues: Metacognition
Metacognition is defined as
Cognition about cognition (Flavell, 1979)
Model of cognition (Nelson, 1996)
monitoring control
Meta-
cognition
Cognition

15. Facets of metacognition: Monitoring
Metacognitive experiences (ME, i.e., feelings, judgments).
They provide input for the exercise of control.
Examples of ME
Feeling of knowing
Feeling of difficulty
Judgment of response correctness
Confidence
Judgment of learning
Judgment of creativity
Satisfaction with the response produced,…

16. Metacognitive experiences and the gifted
Gifted students do not differ from typical students on global predictive ME or calibration bias.
Gifted students seem to outperform typical students on calibration of postdictive metacognitive experiences.
Local, item-by-item calibration accuracy partially mediates the relationship between giftedness and exam performance (Snyder et al., 2011).

17. Metacognitive experiences and the gifted
People overestimate the creativity of their work (overconfidence).
Creativity judgments are calibrated and increase accuracy when there are external, explicit criteria of creativity.
However, evaluating own product before that of others leads to low accuracy (Birney et al., 2016).

18. Facets of metacognition: Monitoring
Metacognitive knowledge (beliefs, declarative knowledge)
Persons (e.g., I am good at mathematics)
Tasks (e.g., easy or difficult tasks)
Strategies (e.g., knowledge of domain/task-specific strategies)
Goals (e.g., knowledge of goals pursued in domains/tasks)
Students judge the creativity of own and others’ creative products based on MK, task and quality of the creative product (e.g., creative to the self vs. recognized as creative by others) (Kaufmann et al., 2016),

19. Metacognitive knowledge
Epistemological beliefs (e.g., beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning, criteria for the validity of knowledge).
Implicit theories of intelligence (entity vs. incremental)
Young gifted students tend to hold incremental view for intelligence and entity for giftedness (Makel et al., 2015)
but older students tend to endorse entity view for intelligence as well (Park et al., 2016).

20. Facets of metacognition: Control
Use of strategies (procedural knowledge)
Allocation of resources (e.g., effort and time)
Cognitive strategies (e.g., how to actually process a task to
achieve a cognitive outcome, memory or studying strategies)
Metacognitive skills (e.g., orienting, planning, checking, evaluating)

21. Metacognitive skills - SRL
Gifted students spontaneously use cognitive strategies and often rely on impulsive strategies.
Gifted underachievers have deficits in strategic functioning.
However, they can be trained to use metacognitive strategies.
Most importantly, motivation and self-concept/self-efficacy moderate the relationship between cognitive ability and strategy use, particularly when perception of one’s own competence is high (Dresel & Haugwitz, 2005).

22. Definitional issues: Affect
Generic term denoting experiential states characterized by positive or negative valence. It encompasses
emotions (e.g., achievement emotions, epistemic emotions)
moods
feelings (emotional, metacognitive)
self-esteem
attitudes (positive, negative)
passions

23. Introduction: Example behaviors
Let us take some examples of behaviors of gifted students that show interactions of metacognition with affect:
1. Philip is a talented student. He is in good mood because he likes the course he is attending. He judges the lesson taught as easy to learn compared to one he does not like and gets engaged in classroom activities.
2. Emma is very proficient in mathematics. She does the classroom exercises quickly and feels confident her response is correct. The teacher urges her to check the response and evaluate its correctness. She refuses.

24. Introduction: Example behaviors
3. A gifted student, Cindy, finds the classroom lesson too easy, simplistic and boring. However, she likes the teacher and decides to collaborate with her in carrying out the lesson so that the teacher and the other students can benefit the most of it.
4. An exceptionally able student, Tony, keeps asking the teacher questions in private and discusses ideas about the content of the lesson because he wants to know more.

25. Introduction: Example behaviors
5. On the contrary, Nick is gifted in mathematics and more advanced in the concepts of a course than his fellow-students and even the teacher. The teacher complains that Nick is cynical and creating problems in the classroom all the time.
6. A teacher knows that some of the students are highly able academically. He chooses very advanced problems for them to solve in a test. The students fail and stop working in the classroom. They decide to ask for help from another teacher.

26. The metacognitive and Affective model of SRL (MASRL)

27. Self-regulation: Mechanisms (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Bandura, 1986)
Positive feedback loop
Rate of progress
operation
Negative feedback loop
Goal
Performance
Compar
ator
Current situation

28. Mechanisms: Fluency
At a cognitive level, processing fluency impacts both affect and metacognition (Efklides, 2016; Efklides et al., in press).
Fluency is a cue for metacognitive feelings such as feeling of familiarity, feeling of difficulty, judgment of learning, etc.
Subjective ease or difficulty of processing (metacognitive feelings) has informational value for cognitive or evaluative judgments (e.g., truth) and belief formation.
Fluency is also a cue for teachers when they judge their students’ learning.

29. Mechanisms: Fluency and affect
Fluency is associated with positive affect whereas disfluency with negative affect.
Fluency also contributes to emotions such as liking, enjoyment, and interest. Objects easy to process (i.e., fluency experiences) are liked more then objects hard to process.
However, changes of interest are influenced by both fluency and perceived difficulty, that is, the combined effect of affect and metacognition.
This effect is reversed if the difficulty of processing is considered instrumental for achieving one’s goal (instrumentality heuristic). The experienced difficulty is associated with higher liking.

30. Mechanisms: Cognitive interruption and epistemic emotions
Cognitive states such as interruption of processing give rise to surprise (when the interruption is unexpected) and feeling of difficulty, because interruptions give rise to effortful revision processes.
Insufficient knowledge on a topic of interest or inability to access knowledge impacts emotions such as curiosity and metacognitive feelings such as confidence or TOT.
Conflict among knowledge states or response tendencies gives rise to confusion and feeling of difficulty as well as awareness of increased effort exertion.

31. Mechanisms: Effects of affect on metacognition
There are also effects of affect on metacognitive experiences.
Negative mood or affect increases the self-reported feeling of difficulty and effort, and decreases confidence.
Positive mood, on the other hand, is associated with increased effort expenditure and confidence in one’s response.
However, the effects of affect on ME are evidenced when the task is demanding. It seems that negative mood functions as information that the task is difficult and more effort is needed.

32. Effects of affect on metacognition
Remembered utility. It is a measure of experienced pleasure or pain (difficulty) associated with a past experience. It influences prospective choice to repeat or avoid similar situations in the future (Finn, 2010).
Effort-related unpleasant physiological responses. They are encoded in metacognitive knowledge about effort. Students have two distinct sets of beliefs:
(a) Effort and persistence are effective
(b) Effort and persistence are not effective and have cost (e.g., exhaustion)

33. Mechanisms: Interactions of metacognition with self-concept
High achieving gifted students have higher self-efficacy and self-concept than non-gifted students (Hong & Aqui, 2004) or low achieving gifted.
Confidence along with experiences of mastery (e.g., feeling of improvement or progress made, fluency, ease of learning, or overcoming of obstacles and experienced difficulty ) and awareness of effort exerted are critical for self-efficacy beliefs (Usher, 2009).
Feeling of difficulty, estimate of effort exerted and confidence are influenced by self-concept and feed back on it (Efklides & Tsiora, 2002).

34. Mechanisms: Interactions of metacognition with self-concept
Ease or difficulty in task processing is encoded in metacognitive knowledge of the self and self-concept (Efklides & Vlachopoulos, 2012).
However, even if gifted students (e.g., academically or creatively) do not differ in self-concept of ability (e.g., in mathematics) creatively gifted students report more effort expenditure and more use of cognitive strategies than academically gifted students (Hong & Aqui, 2004). This reflects differential awareness of ME.
Finally, self-concept moderates the relationship between cognitive ability and strategy use (Dresel & Haugwitz, 2005).

35. Mechanisms: Perfectionism and ME
Perfectionism (adaptive vs. maladaptive; self-oriented vs. socially prescribed)
It is related to effort to achieve high standards or awareness of discrepancy from the desired level of performance.
It works as motivation but presupposes metacognitive judgments of the correctness of one’s response vis-à-vis standards (satisfaction with the response produced).
It can facilitate quality performance

36. Perfectionism and emotions
High standards predict positive emotions (e.g., pride, enjoyment)
whereas discrepancy is associated with negative (fear,
anxiety, sadness, shame) (Tan & Chun, 2014).
Presumably, too high standards can lead to avoidance to work on a task.

37. Mechanisms: Motivation, affect, and metacognition
Expectancy-value motivation can function at a person level (e.g., based on previous encounters with tasks) or during task processing (Efklides et al., in press).
Metacognitive experiences (e.g., JOL, feeling of difficulty, awareness of effort) impact perceptions of value (e.g., cost) and expectancy during task processing.
Conversely, task/item value impacts JOLs and subsequent metacognitive control decisions.

38. Motivation, affect, and metacognition
Causal attributions: They trigger emotions(e.g., pride, shame, gratitude, surprise, hope, anger, guilt, etc.) depending on the perceived cause (or causal dimension) underlying the outcome of one’s behavior (Weiner, 1985, 2014).
Metacognitive experiences such as confidence, effort, or experienced difficulty provide cues for the triggering of attributions (Metallidou, 2001).
However, there can be direct effects of ME on emotions. For example, state anxiety during task processing is predicted by anxiety-trait but also, inversely, by confidence (Dina & Efklides, 2009).

39. Conclusions
Gifted students do not constitute a single, coherent group in terms of domain of competence and achievement. Their strengths can also be a source of difficulties for effective self-regulation of learning (e.g., fluency, multiple interests).
Gifted students do self-regulate their learning but not necessarily in a constructive and efficient way from a long-term perspective.
Self-regulation is based on interactions between cognition, metacognition, motivation, and affect. Moreover, it is not always conscious and deliberate.

40. Conclusions
There are multiple mechanisms that underlie SRL among which are monitoring of fluency, metacognitive experiences, and affect.
This entails that control decisions may be guided by the task demands and the student’s goal (top down mode) but also by the metacognitive and affective experiences during task processing (bottom up).
Control may involve use of (meta)cognitive strategies but also strategies for the regulation of emotions and motivation or the environment.
The above framework opens up new perspectives in the conception of SRL interventions.

41. Thank you for your attention!

42. Self-regulated learning
One of the most influential models of SRL is the cyclic model by Zimmerman (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011)
Fore-
thought
Self-
reflection
Perform-
ance

43. The role of affect/emotions in SRL
Achievement emotions
They are experienced in competence-relevant activities or performance outcomes. They comprise:
Task-related emotions (e.g., interest)
Prospective outcome emotions (e.g., joy, helplessness)
Activity-related (e.g., anxiety, enjoyment, boredom)
Retrospective outcome-related (e.g., pride, shame, anger)
Epistemic emotions
They are knowledge-related (e.g., curiosity, surprise,
confusion)

44. The role of affect/emotions in SRL
Epistemic emotions such as curiosity is also associated with giftedness
There are two basic types of curiosity:
Perceptual and epistemic curiosity (Interest- type and deprivation-type)
Interest-type is associated with positive affect and broadening of one’s knowledge/perspectives in a domain
Deprivation-type is associated with negative affect, lack of knowledge, or low confidence that our response is correct
Not all forms of curiosity are beneficial for progress in learning

45. The role of affect/emotions in SRL
As student move from primary to secondary education there is decrease off enjoyment and increase of boredom.
Enjoyment and interest facilitate problem-focused coping whereas boredom avoidant coping and anger-related emotion regulation.
Boredom is detrimental to persistence
Boredom is caused by factors such as
environment (e.g., monotony, isolation, repetition)
person characteristics (e.g., boredom as trait)
environment/person fit (e.g., too high or too low difficulty)
The regulation of boredom can be done via re-appraisal, criticism, or avoidance (evading)