Chapter 7, page 136
Self-monitoring. Self-monitoring refers to observing and keeping track of the activities in which
you are engaged and checking whether you are on track to achieve your goals (Israel, Block, Bauserman, &
Kinnucan-Welsch, 2005; Yang, 2006). Self-monitoring thus involves evaluating how well you are
progressing toward your goals. For this reason, the term self-evaluation can be used to refer to self-
monitoring. Self-monitoring refers to checking your progress as you are working toward a goal. Self-
evaluation can also refer to this process of checking progress along the way, or it can also refer to a more
final evaluation at the end of the activity to determine how well your goals were met.
There are at least two separate processes involved in self-monitoring (Dole et al., 1991). The first is
articulating the criteria that you will use to judge your performance. For example, if you are planning to
write a term paper, you might decide that you are going to judge the quality of your own paper in terms of
the number of articles cited, the complexity of the ideas you are presenting, the coherence of the paper, and
the extent to which you have integrated the various findings. The second process is judging how well you
have done in achieving the goals you have set. After writing the first draft of your term paper, you may
decide that you have done well on three of the goals but that you have failed to develop complex ideas.
Consequently, in working onIU9 the next draft, you try to brainstorm a web of complex and poignant ideas
of your own that you could infuse into the paper.
Time management. Recall how Gisela assigned each course a designated amount of time as she
planned her evening. Time management is organizing one’s time effectively to accomplish one’s goals (Rief
& Heimburge, 2006). Students with higher academic achievement report greater use of effective time
management strategies such as planning how to spend time, prioritizing activities, and allocating sufficient
time to accomplish high-priority activities (e.g., Zimmerman, Greenberg, & Weinstein, 1994).
Self-regulation of motivation and interest. Effective learners can enhance their own interest and
motivation more effectively than less effective learners can (Sansone et al., 1992). Effective learners have a
variety of strategies for piquing their own interest and stimulating their own motivation (Wolters, 2003).
For instance, they may reward themselves periodically by taking a break after reading each 10 pages in a
textbook. They may tell themselves why it is important to learn this, or they may find ways to make a game
of what they are learning (perhaps competing with themselves to see how many vocabulary words they can
remember on each pass through the vocabulary cards). They may try to relate material they are learning to
their own lives as much as possible by trying to come up with personal examples of key concepts. Or they
may make predictions about the content of upcoming material and see whether their initial answers are
borne out by the text as they read it.
Executive control. Effective strategy users select and orchestrate the many different strategies as
they undertake complex learning, problem solving, and reasoning tasks, as Gisela did when writing her
paper. Gisela used many different strategies and made appropriate choices about when to use each strategy.
This requires the learner to be skilled at controlling and managing different strategies and to use the
strategies at appropriate times. When learners can orchestrate strategies in this way, they are said to have
executive control of all the strategies they are using. Executive control is such a critical aspect of self-
regulation that it can be regarded as an important strategy in its own right.
To summarize this section: The core general-purpose self-regulation strategies are setting goals,
selecting strategies to achieve these goals (which can include self-regulation of motivation and interest and
of time), and then self-monitoring or self-evaluation to see how the process is going. Executive control
strategies oversee the entire process. General purpose self-regulation strategies can be used on almost all
tasks—from studying a textbook and writing a paper to carrying out a science experiment. In the next
section, we will focus on strategies fairly specific to the task of comprehending texts or lectures.