Challenges to Self-Regulation
Can purposeful efforts to self-regulate prove unproductive or even counter-
productive in some circumstances? As we previously discussed, reactive self-
regulators are often unsuccessful despite their best intentions. For example,
an adolescent girl who wants to lose weight may choose the counterproduc-
tive strategy of vomiting after eating a meal, and she becomes bulimic. Fur-
thermore, strategies that are initially effective must be adjusted to frequently
changing personal and environmental conditions, and poor self-monitoring
can lead to faulty strategy adjustments, such as when golfers allow bad habits
to slip into their game. Several researchers have argued that conscious efforts
to self-regulate one’s learning can interfere with adaptive performance in dy-
namic settings (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989; Singer, Lidor, & Cauraugh, 1993)
or with the flow of spontaneous creative ideas (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).
These two interpretations of self-regulation are based on differing assump-
tions about the value of unconsciousness in intellectual functioning, namely
as a source of automaticity (Singer, Lidor, & Cauraugh, 1993) or spontaneity
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). According to the intellectual automaticity view,
unconscious learning is the highest form of self-regulation, but according to
the intellectual spontaneity view, unconscious learning is the antithesis of in-
tentional self-regulation.
In contrast, social cognitive researchers have avoided dualistic conscious–
unconscious views of human intellectual functioning and instead have em-
braced hierarchical goal formulations in which learners can shift their atten-
tion from one level of functioning to another, such as between process and
outcome goals (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001). As we discussed earlier,
automaticity in performance is viewed as an outgrowth of the intentional use
of self-regulatory processes, and this high level of performance proficiency
enables learners to shift their attention to self-regulatory outcome goals with-
out dysfunction. Both before automaticity is attained and after, learners are
conscious of their intellectual functioning. What has changed is the target of
their attention (i.e., their goals). As we previously noted, research on the de-
velopment of writing proficiency has revealed that shifting goals hierarchi-
cally from process to outcomes at the point of automaticity produces signifi-
cantly more learning than no (conscious) goals, process goals alone, or
outcome goals alone (Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 1999). Furthermore, when
unexpected outcomes are experienced, hierarchical learners shift cyclically
from outcome goals to process goals, demonstrating the cognitive flexibility
predicted by a hierarchical view of intellectual functioning.
Flow experiences, which reflect students’ lack of awareness of the passage
of time due to their cognitive immersion in an academic task, can be inter-
preted as a shift in attention from temporal outcomes to task processes rather
than as a loss of consciousness because students remain conscious of atem-
poral aspects their intellectual functioning. Although an awareness of time
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