Self-regulation involves more than metacognition: A social cognitive perspective

The issues that Winne found troubling about student failures to self-regulate effectively were considered from a social cognitive perspective. From this viewpoint, self-regulation involves more than metacognitive knowledge and skill, it involves an underlying sense of self-efficacy and personal agency and the motivational and behavioral processes to put these self beliefs into effect. Views of self-regulated learning that do not include this core self-referential system have difficulty explaining human failures to self-regulate, especially when such efforts are known metacognitively to be helpful. To explain students' self-regulation failures as well as their successes in naturalistic settings, educational psychologists need to expand their views of self-regulation beyond metacognitive trait, ability, or stage formulations and begin treating it as a complex interactive process involving social, motivational, and behavioral components. Such a perspective reveals not only the complexity of self-regulation but also the human side of it-the role of our self-doubts, false beliefs, unfortunate self-monitoring, and strategy choice dilemmas.