Supporting Home-Based Self-Regulated Learning for Secondary School Students: An Educational Design Study

The implementation of home-based learning for secondary school students faces challenges such as weakened supervision, a lack of prior online learning experience, and low self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. To address this, we propose an implementation mechanism to help teachers develop students' SRL skills in home-based learning environments. After three iterations of design, implementation, and evaluation, following the educational-design research approach, the proposed implementation mechanism was empirically validated and refined. The results confirmed the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework, one which integrates strategies of goal setting and planning, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation. We also demonstrated that the designed implementation mechanism, which comprises the four components of sequence, resource, activity, and incentive, helped students master SRL skills and improve nonacademic performance. Lastly, we identified seven design principles that can guide educators in the adoption of similar practices to develop students' SRL skills, particularly for future flexible and smart learning scenarios. These principles emphasize the motivational, sequential, social, and instrumental aspects of instructional design, and call for parental involvement and a flexible mindset during implementation. The paper ends with a discussion of several limitations regarding sample representativeness and data diversity that should be noted when interpreting the study results.