Chapter 4: Designing Assessments of Self-regulated Learning

Assessment has three key features (American Educational Research Association, 1999). First, a systematic method is applied to collect information (data) that an assessor believes can provide grounds for inferences about attributes of people or objects. Usually, methods take form as an instrument, for example: a list of questions, a task with instructions for completing it or a situation in which the person being assessed behaves. Second, assessors follow a protocol to develop inferences based on the data that was gathered. Third, the inference is validated.

Issues that bear on assessing self-regulated learning (SRL) have been previously examined in major publications by Pintrich, Wolters, and Baxter (2000), Samuelstuen and Bråten (2007), Winne and Perry (2000), Winne, Jamieson-Noel, and Muis (2002) and Zimmerman (2008). Additional work that examined issues bearing on assessing SRL and its features has been contributed by Hadwin, Winne, Stockley, Nesbit, and Wosczyna (2001), Pintrich (2004), and Winne (2010). In brief and acknowledging omission of elaborations that can be found in these publications, the gist of prior analyses regarding how SRL is assessed is: