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Theoreticians seem unanimous--the most effective learners are self-regulating. In academic contexts, self-regulation is a style of engaging with tasks in which students exercise a suite of powerful skills: setting goals for upgrading knowledge; deliberating about strategies to select those that balance progress toward goals against unwanted costs; and, as steps are taken and the task evolves, monitoring the accumulating effects of their engagement. As these events unfold seriatim, obstacles may be encountered. It may become necessary for self-regulating learners to adjust or even abandon initial goals, to manage motivation, and to adapt and occasionally invent tactics for making progress. Self-regulated students are thus aware of qualities of their own knowledge, beliefs, motivation, and cognitive processing--elements that jointly create situated updates of the tasks on which the students work. This awareness provides grounds on which the students judge how well unfolding cognitive engagement matches the standards they set for successful learning (Corno, 1993; Howard-Rose & Winne, 1993; Winne, in press; Zimmerman, 1990). In short, self-regulated learning (SRL) is a deliberate, judgmental, adaptive process.
For all self-regulated activities, feedback is an inherent catalyst. As learners monitor their engagement with tasks, internal feedback is generated by the monitoring process. That feedback describes the nature of outcomes and the qualities of the cognitive processing that led to those states. We hypothesize that more effective learners develop idiosyncratic cognitive routines for creating internal feedback while they are engaged with academic tasks. For example, by setting a plan for engaging in a task, a learner generates criteria against which successive states of engagement can be monitored. In some cases, when a discrepancy exists between current and desired performance, self-regulated learners seek feedback from external sources such as peers' contributions in collaborative groups, teachers' remarks on work done in class, and answer sections of textbooks. Research generally confirms that learners are more effective when they attend to externally provided feedback (Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, Kulik, & Morgan, 1991; Kulhavy & Stock, 1989; Meyer, 1986).
Traditionally, studies of feedback in educational settings have focused on information provided to students by an external source, such as a teacher or a computer. Usually, this feedback is not available during learning activities but is given after a task has been completed or a test of achievement has been...