Cue-based facilitation of self-regulated learning: A discussion of multidisciplinary innovations and technologies

This article discusses the seven contributions to the special issue Facilitation of self-regulated learning. We first introduce the cue-utilization framework to study self-regulated learning; the basic idea of this framework is that learners use whatever cues are available to monitor and control their learning processes. This framework is then used to position, discuss, and critically compare the seven contributions, which represent a wide variety of approaches to self-regulated learning. Based on our analysis, five main conclusions are presented: (1) there is a tendency to focus investigations on learners' monitoring and reflection whereas it might be more fruitful to take the full learning cycle into account, (2) there are strong indications that learners' use cues to regulate their learning but which cues they are actually using depends on many different factors including the type and level of learning, (3) there is a clear need for the provision of metacognitive prompts to learners that stimulate them to use more diagnostic cues and make better control decisions, (4) on the instructional-sequence level, facilitation of self-regulated learning might include 'second-order' scaffolding where the number of prompts decreases as learners acquire more self-regulated learning skills, and (5) affective states may serve as cues but how they interact with cognitive cues is still unknown. We conclude that a design approach to self-regulated learning might help to acknowledge its enormous complexity.