Self-Determined Learning to Motivate Struggling Learners in Reading and Writing

Abstract

Promoting self-determined learning through student-directed learning strategies has been documented to promote more positive school-related outcomes for upper elementary grade learners with disabilities and other students who are struggling. These strategies are typically introduced in multicomponent interventions combining several student-directed learning strategies such as self-monitoring, self-evaluation, antecedent cue regulation, and self-instruction. Such interventions have established efficacy in promoting a wide array of academic outcomes. Students’ motivation is consistently related to academic achievement, but it has been found to change over time, with intrinsic motivation’s having marked decreases into the later elementary years and into middle school. This article reviews the literature on the impact of promoting self-determination and self-determined learning strategies that can be used to promote more positive reading and writing outcomes to enable students to become autonomous learners.

Keywords

self-determination self-determined learning self-directed learning autonomous motivation autonomy-supportive interventions

One aspect of reading and writing instruction that does not get discussed frequently is the role of the student in the instructional process and his or her motivation to learn. There is research evidence to support the importance of promoting self-determination and self-regulated learning as a means to improve academic outcomes, including reading and writing, for learners with disabilities (Fowler, Konrad, Walker, Test, & Wood, 2007; Graham & Harris, 2005). This article defines and discusses self-determination, autonomous motivation, and self-regulated/student-directed learning and their importance to reading and writing instruction for elementary school students. There is evidence that student engagement and intrinsic motivation decrease as they move into the upper elementary grades (Wigfield, Eccles, Schiefele, Roeser, & Davis-Kean, 2007), and it is especially important to target these issues before this decline occurs. In this article, readers will learn about the importance of creating autonomy-supportive classrooms and promoting self-determination through multicomponent interventions combining student-directed learning strategies such as self-monitoring, self-evaluation, antecedent cue regulation, and self-instruction.

Self-Determination and Autonomous Motivation

Being self-determined means that the person makes or causes things to happen in her or his own life instead of someone else or something else making or causing things to happen for or to that person. The term comes from centuries-old discussions in philosophy and psychology about what causes humans to act in the ways that they do and is rooted in the philosophical doctrine of determinism, which implies, simply, that all things, including human behavior, are in some way caused. Self-determined people are actors in their own lives; they act based upon their own volition rather than the will of other people or the pressures of circumstances or environments (Shogren, Wehmeyer, Palmer, Forber-Pratt, et al., 2015).

There is evidence that enhancing self-determination results in more positive school and postschool outcomes for students with disabilities (Shogren, Palmer, Wehmeyer, Williams-Diehm, & Little, 2012; Shogren, Wehmeyer, Palmer, Rifenbark, & Little, 2015). For example, interventions to promote self-determination have been shown to support academic and transition goal attainment, engagement with the curriculum, postschool employment outcomes, and postschool community access outcomes for youth across disability categories (Rowe, Mazzotti, & Sinclair, 2015; Wehmeyer, 2014, 2015).

Being more self-determined results in both enhanced motivation to learn and the skills to make things happen in one’s learning and one’s life (Wehmeyer, 2014). Several theoretical models provide explanations for these components. Self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2012) is a theory of motivation concerned with why people engage in intrinsically motivated actions. Self-determination theory proposes that human beings have basic psychological needs for

relatedness (e.g., the desire for close emotional bonds and feelings of connectedness to others in the social world),

autonomy (e.g., the need to feel that one’s actions are volitional in nature), and

competence (e.g., the need to successfully engage, manipulate, and negotiate the environment).

These basic psychological needs serve as the “energizer of behavior” (Deci & Ryan, 2012, p. 101). That is, a person’s efforts to address his or her needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence result in autonomous motivation that energizes causal action (Deci & Ryan, 2012).

As individuals strive to meet basic psychological and biological needs, they engage in self-regulated, goal-directed action, or causal action, that enables them to navigate varying environmental and contextual challenges, and they become more effective in their causal action and develop enhanced self-determination (Shogren, Wehmeyer, Palmer, Forber-Pratt, et al., 2015). When they are self-determined, students approach tasks, including tasks associated with reading and writing, in a manner that is autonomously motivated and employs self-regulation and self-directed learning skills. To achieve such outcomes, teachers can do two general things: first, create autonomy-supportive classrooms and, second, promote self-determination and self-directed and self-regulated learning skills. Each of these is discussed next.

Autonomy-Supportive Classrooms

Research has shown that autonomous motivation is linked to children’s reading more frequently and to mastery of important reading skills (De Naeghel, Van Keer, & Vanderlinde, 2014). Unfortunately, research also shows that autonomous motivation to read declines as children progress through school (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000), beginning in upper elementary grades (Wigfield et al., 2007). Promoting autonomous motivation in the later elementary years, then, becomes critically important. What can teachers do to promote autonomously motivated learning? First, a teacher can create autonomy-supportive classrooms. Second, a teacher can implement strategies to promote autonomous learning and motivation.

Autonomy-Supportive Teaching and Classrooms

Autonomy-supportive teaching and establishing autonomy-supportive classrooms involve establishing learning environments that maximize student involvement and self-direction and minimize teacher-controlled actions. Reeve (2002) summarized several studies of autonomy-supportive teaching and concluded that among instructional behaviors, “autonomy-supportive teachers distinguished themselves by listening more, spending less time holding instructional materials such as notes or books, giving students time for independent work, and giving fewer answers to the problems students face” (p. 186). In examining conversational statements of autonomy-supportive teachers, Reeve found that these teachers used a number of strategies, including avoiding giving directives, consistently praising mastery, avoiding criticism, giving answers less often, and responding to student-generated questions and statements with empathy and perspective taking. Autonomy-supportive teachers are responsive, are flexible, and motivate through interest (Reeve, 2002). Controlling teachers take charge, shape students toward a right answer, evaluate, and motivate through pressure. Autonomy-supportive classrooms are learning communities in which students have meaningful roles in setting classroom rules, feel safe to explore and take risks, are supported to solve problems and set personal goals, and are responsible for monitoring and evaluating their progress (Reeve, 2002).

Teachers who want to create such learning communities can follow a set of principles that should be addressed throughout the year (Wehmeyer, Sands, Knowlton, & Kozleski, 2002).

Principle 1. Teachers should get to know the cognitive, social, and affective needs of each of their students well. They should get to know each student well by creating opportunities for interviewing each student individually and discussing student strengths. In addition, teachers should engage other class members in the same sorts of tasks at the beginning of each year to create opportunities for students to get to know on another. Creating a biography newsletter or creating 5-min video biographies are two ways to do this.

Principle 2. Teachers should develop, maintain, and use a consistent and sustainable system of collecting information about individual and group performance that will help them make informed grouping decisions throughout the year. Setting up situations in which students can be observed and teachers can learn about individual students also means that there is a need for a system to record observations about individual students. Teachers can use multiple methods and strategies to gather data and certainly should include students in that data collection through self-monitoring and self-evaluation, as discussed subsequently.

Principle 3. Teach students how to work together for multiple outcomes. First, teachers must teach specific skills to students so they can work together successfully. Students need to learn how to listen to each other and paraphrase what they hear. They need to understand how to take turns and make sure that everyone has a chance to voice their opinion or share their ideas. These skills require teaching, modeling, and practicing specific skills and then holding each student accountable for using these skills in his or her group. Students who work in learning teams need verbal and written feedback about how they work together. The teacher’s responsibility is to teach the skills, create learning tasks that are sufficiently engaging to motivate students to participate, and evaluate student performance against task and process standards.

Principle 4. Teachers need to understand and perform their role with learning groups as a facilitator as well as instructor. The teacher’s role is not to direct student learning but to support students to self-direct learning and to facilitate active student engagement in learning through strategies such as self-monitoring and self-evaluation (see subsequent section).

Principle 5. Make achievement and success a public and explicit conversation in the classroom on a daily basis. Simply put, teachers wanting to create learning communities that support autonomous motivation must ensure that each student, regardless of age or ability level, receives and talks about success and progress each day.

Promoting Autonomous Motivation

Creating a learning community and engaging in autonomy-supportive instructional and conversational actions begin the process of promoting student autonomous reading and writing motivation. De Naeghel et al. (2014) identified strategies linked to each of the basic psychological needs identified by self-determination theory: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy support strategies, linked to the basic need for autonomy, include

giving students options from which to choose,

identifying and basing instruction upon students’ preferences and interests, and

promoting student self-initiation of actions.

Strategies linked to the students’ need for competence involve practices that

provide optimal challenges for students,

clearly communicate expectations, and

provide consistent and positive feedback.

Strategies that are linked to students’ need for relatedness include strategies that

emphasize relationship building and

promote positive social interactions.

Research has explicitly identified sources of reading and writing motivation to include

providing students with choices about what and when to read,

linking reading and writing instruction to student interests,

scaffolding and providing positive feedback, and

creating social groups around reading and writing (De Naeghel et al., 2014).

Several literacy programs have provided examples of how to integrate these motivational strategies. Self-regulated strategy development is a writing intervention that embodies the characteristics of strategies to build autonomous motivation (Alharbi, Hott, Jones, & Henry, 2015; Graham & Harris, 2005). The self-regulated strategy development process involves the teacher’s modeling various strategies, with five steps involved:

discuss how using the strategies will enable students to be successful;

model the strategy, verbalizing self-instructions as you go through the strategy;

work with students to create mnemonics or other ways of remembering the strategy and enabling students to customize the strategy;

support students to use the strategy frequently; and

learners use the strategy independently (Graham & Harris, 2005).

The concept-oriented reading instruction (CORI) program is an example of a reading intervention that embodies these characteristics. The CORI program (Wigfield, Mason-Singh, Ho, & Guthrie, 2014) was “designed to enhance students’ reading motivation and reading comprehension by merging reading strategy instruction, conceptual knowledge in science, and support for student motivation” (p. 38). Within the CORI process, practices that enhance motivation include setting up partnerships, collaborations, and teams for reading and writing; providing choices; building relevance into reading and writing activities; and supporting students to read for interest.

Motivation is generally believed to support cognitive ability rather than operating independently from it (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2011). For example, highly motivated students demonstrate increased effort, perseverance, help-seeking (e.g., asking questions or seeking assistance), and active engagement (Vansteenkiste, Lens, & Deci, 2006); show continued persistence in the face of obstacles and adversity (Multon, Brown, & Lent, 1991; Schunk, 1991); and spend more time reading outside of school than their peers (Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997). The skills supported by motivation enhance the likelihood of successful learning experiences. Toste, Capin, Vaughn, Roberts, and Kearns (2016) and Toste, Capin, Williams, and Vaughn (2016) proposed strategies to enhance the motivation of upper elementary students within the context of a reading intervention.

They targeted students’ beliefs about self and reading through self-reflection, positive self-talk, and recognition of negative statements. Each lesson began by asking students to think about their current readiness on a scale from 1 to 5 using a simple check-in poster. Throughout the year, the teacher modeled how to use positive self-talk and generate self-motivated statements to support efforts while reading. They use scenarios about students to help students engage in this task:

We are going to use our positive thoughts to help us work hard today. To practice, I’m going to tell you a story about another student, and I want you to think of examples of how to turn this student’s negative thoughts to positive ones. Marco [a pseudonym] is in the fourth grade. He reads books to his younger brother all the time, but he doesn’t think he is a good reader. When it’s time to take a test in class, he gets mad when he doesn’t know an answer. Marco just wishes tests were never invented! Now who can help Marco be successful by giving him some examples of positive thoughts? [Students will provide examples of positive thought statements.] Who can tell me why these positive thoughts will help Marco?

After students became proficient at generating their own self-motivated statements, students were asked to identify the negative thoughts that a student (usually a struggling reader in the upper elementary grades) may be having, and then help that student generate positive self-talk to support their learning. They discussed real academic situations wherein they had experienced difficulty, the types of thoughts they may have had during that situation, and how they could recognize and change negative thoughts when they arise in future.

How to Promote Self-Determination

The instructional and conversational behaviors and instructional strategies identified in the prior section are specifically targeted to enhance autonomous motivation. The strategies discussed in this section are intended to support skills that enable students to engage in causal action. Promoting self-determination involves teaching students the skills, such as goal setting, problem solving, decision making, and self-advocacy, that enable students to make or cause things to happen in their own lives (Wehmeyer, 2014). One means to teach students these skills is the implementation of student-directed learning strategies.

Student-Directed Learning Strategies

Student-directed learning strategies provide teachers with both effective instructional strategies to promote student learning and a means to promote and enhance active student involvement in learning. These strategies involve teaching students strategies that enable them to modify and regulate their own behavior. There are numerous such strategies, but several that are of particular importance (i.e., self-instruction, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation) are highlighted here, although these components are usually bundled together and paired with other strategies, such as goal setting.

Self-instruction involves teaching students to provide their own verbal cues prior to the execution of target behaviors. Self-instruction allows a student to provide him- or herself with sufficient verbal information to cue a response, information that might otherwise not be provided or be provided by an adult.

Self-monitoring involves teaching students to observe whether they have performed a targeted behavior and whether the response met whatever existing criteria were present. Self-monitoring and self-recording procedures have been shown to improve the motivation and performance of students with disabilities.

Self-evaluation involves teaching the student to compare his or her performance (as tracked through self-monitoring) and comparing that performance with a desired goal or outcome (Agran, King-Sears, Wehmeyer, & Copeland, 2003).

Joseph and Eveleigh (2011) reviewed studies published between 1998 and 2007 on the effects of self-monitoring methods on the reading achievement of students with disabilities. They concluded that “the reading performance of students with disabilities improved when they used self-monitoring methods” (p. 49) and found that students made more accurate responses and produced more work when they used self-monitoring methods than when they did not. Similarly, self-instruction and closely related strategies such as self-questioning and self-talk have been shown to improve reading outcomes. Joseph, Alber-Morgan, Cullen, and Rouse (2015) conducted a review of the literature in self-questioning, determining that such strategies had been found to be effective in teaching students to identify main ideas and details, summarizing information, identifying grammar parts, retelling information, checking for understanding of text, and acquiring new content.

The most frequently studied student-directed learning strategy in reading instruction is the use of self-monitoring. Generally, some sort of checklist or tally device is used in self-monitoring, along with an audible cue (e.g., chime ringing, watch beeping, or teacher direction), to cue the strategy. Self-monitoring usually focuses on tasks, behaviors, or processes that a student already knows how to do; a behavior that a student is already aware that he or she does; or the student’s monitoring how much she or he is performing a specific behavior. Examples of self-monitoring include the following:

Am I on task right now? Yes or no.

Each time I complete a problem, I put a checkmark on my self-monitoring form.

Have I finished the task?

Was my behavior good or not OK? If good, I circle the smiley face. If not OK, I circle the frown face.

Am I organized for this class or not? Let me check—I have my pencil, paper, and book. Now I need to check each off on my organization worksheet. Yes—they’re all checked. I am organized for this class.

Did I bring in my homework today and put it where it belongs? Here’s my homework; I need to put it where it belongs, and then check off on my index card that today’s homework is completed and turned in (Agran et al., 2003).

Self-evaluation is an extension of self-monitoring, teaching students to determine whether their performance, as recorded through self-monitoring, meets a standard. This can be done through using a rating scale, charting, graphing, or other means of summarizing the self-monitoring information.

Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction

The self-determined learning model of instruction (Wehmeyer et al., 2009) is an evidence-based practice to enable teachers to teach students to teach themselves. Appropriate for use with students with and without disabilities across a wide range of content areas, the SDLMI enables teachers to engage students in the totality of their educational program by increasing opportunities to self-direct learning and, in the process, to enhance student self-determination.

Implementation of the model consists of a three-phase instructional process, depicted in Tables 1, 2, and 3. To assist teachers in understanding the SDLMI process, Figure 1 provides a case study of the use of the SDLMI with a fourth-grade student who is struggling with identifying components of narrative text. Each instructional phase presents a problem to be solved by the student. The student solves each problem by posing and answering a series of four Student Questions per phase that students learn, modify to make their own, and apply to reach self-selected goals. Each question is linked to a set of Teacher Objectives. Each instructional phase includes a list of Educational Supports teachers can use to enable students to self-direct learning. In each instructional phase, the student is the primary agent for choices, decisions, and actions, even when eventual actions are teacher directed.

Table 1.

Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction, Phase 1.

Phase 1: Set a Goal
Student Problem to Solve: What Is My goal?
Student Question	Teacher Objective	Educational Support
What do I want to learn?	• Enable students to identify specific strengths and instructional need • Enable students to communicate preferences, interests, beliefs, and values • Teach students to prioritize needs	• Student self-assessment of interests, abilities, and instructional needs • Choice-making instruction • Problem-solving instruction • Decision-making instruction • Goal-setting and attainment instruction
What do I know about it now?	• Enable students to identify their current status in relation to the instructional need • Assist students to gather information about opportunities and barriers in their environment
What must change for me to learn what I don’t know?	• Enable students to decide if action will be focused on capacity building, modifying the environment, or both• Support students to choose a need to address from the prioritized list
What can I do to make this happen?	• Teach students to state a goal and identify criteria for achieving the goal

Table 2.

Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction, Phase 2.

Phase 2: Take Action
Student Problem to Solve: What Is My Plan?
Student Question	Teacher Objective	Educational Support
What can I do to learn what I don’t know?	• Enable student to self-evaluate current status and self-identified goal status	• Self-scheduling• Self-instruction• Choice-making instruction• Teach students to state a
What could keep me from taking action?	• Enable student to determine plan of action to bridge gap between self-evaluated current status and self-identified goal status	• goal and identify criteria for achieving goal• Antecedent cue regulation• Goal-setting instruction
What can I do to remove these barriers?	• Collaborate with student to identify most appropriate instructional strategies• Teach student needed student-directed learning strategies• Support student to implement student-directed learning strategies• Provide mutually agreed-upon teacher-directed instruction	• Goal-attainment strategies• Problem-solving instruction• Decision-making instruction• Self-advocacy instruction• Assertiveness training• Communication skills training
When will I take action?	• Enable student to determine schedule for action plan• Enable student to implement action plan• Enable student to self-monitor progress	• Self-monitoring

Table 3.

Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction, Phase 3.

Phase 3: Adjust Goal or Plan
Student Problem to Solve: What Have I Learned?
Student Question	Teacher Objective	Educational Support
What actions have I taken?	• Enable student to self-evaluate progress toward goal achievement	• Self-evaluation strategies• Choice-making instruction• Goal-setting instruction• Goal-attainment strategies• Problem-solving instruction• Self-reinforcement strategies• Self-recording strategies• Self-monitoring
What barriers have been removed?	• Collaborate with student to compare progress with desired outcomes
What has changed about what I don’t know?	• Support student to reevaluate goal if progress is insufficient• Assist student to decide if goal remains the same or changes• Collaborate with student to identify whether action plan is adequate or inadequate given revised or retained goal• Assist student to change action plan if necessary
Do I know what I want to know?	• Enable student to decide if progress is adequate or inadequate or if goal has been achieved

Figure 1.

Case Study of the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction. This scenario is a fictionalized account drawn from the research literature and not based on actual people or events that were observed by the authors.

The Student Questions are constructed to direct the student through a problem-solving sequence in each instructional phase. The solutions to the problems in each phase lead to the problem-solving sequence in the next phase. Teachers implementing the model teach students to solve a sequence of problems to construct a means-ends chain, a causal sequence, that moves them from where they are (i.e., an actual state of not having their needs and interests satisfied) to where they want to be (i.e., a goal state of having those needs and interests satisfied). To answer the questions in this sequence, students must regulate their own problem solving by setting goals to meet needs, constructing plans to meet goals, and adjusting actions to complete plans. Thus, each instructional phase poses a problem the student must solve (e.g., What is my goal? What is my plan? What have I learned?) by, in turn, solving a series of problems posed by the questions in each phase. The four questions differ from phase to phase but represent identical steps in the problem-solving sequence. That is, students answering the questions must

identify the problem,

identify potential solutions to the problem,

identify barriers to solving the problem, and

identify consequences of each solution.

These steps are the fundamental steps in any problem-solving process, and they form the means-end problem-solving sequence represented by the Student Questions in each phase and enable the student to solve the problem posed in each instructional phase (Wehmeyer et al., 2009).

Because the model itself is designed for teachers to implement, the language of the Student Questions is not written to be understood by every student, nor does the model assume that students have life experiences that enable them to fully answer each question. The Student Questions are written in first-person voice in a relatively simple format with the intention that they are the starting point for discussion between the teacher and the student. Some students will learn and use all 12 questions as they are written. Other students will need to have the questions rephrased to be more understandable. Still other students, due to the intensity of their instructional needs, may have the teacher paraphrase the questions (Wehmeyer et al., 2004).

The first time a teacher uses the model with a student, she or he will read the question with or to the student, discuss what the question means, and then, if necessary, change the wording to enable that student to better understand the intent of the question. Such wording changes must, however, be made so that the problem-solving intent of the question remains intact. The Teacher Objectives within the model are objectives a teacher will be trying to accomplish by implementing the model. In each instructional phase, the objectives are linked directly to the Student Questions. These objectives can be met by utilizing strategies provided in the Educational Supports section of the model. The Teacher Objectives provide, in essence, a road map to assist the teacher to enable the student to solve the problem stated in the Student Question. The model’s emphasis on using instructional strategies and Educational Supports that are student directed provides another means of teaching students to teach themselves. As important as this is, however, not every instructional strategy implemented will be student-directed. The purpose of any model of teaching is to promote student learning and growth. There are circumstances in which the most effective instructional method or strategy to achieve a particular educational outcome will be a teacher-directed strategy. Students who are considering what plan of action to implement to achieve a self-selected goal can recognize that teachers have expertise in instructional strategies and take full advantage of that expertise.

Several studies provide causal evidence of the impact of SDLMI on enhanced student self-determination and student engagement with the curriculum (Lee, Wehmeyer, et al., 2010; Shogren et al., 2012; Wehmeyer, Shogren et al., 2012). Further, there is evidence of the efficacy of SDLMI to promote student academic and functional skills goal attainment (Lee, Wehmeyer, & Shogren, 2015; Shogren et al., 2012). Finally, teachers report higher expectations for student progress after implementing SDLMI (Shogren, Plotner, Palmer, Wehmeyer, & Paek, 2014). SDLMI can be used across goal type, but included among the types of goals set and attained at higher rates by students with disabilities in Lee, Wehmeyer, Soukup, and Palmer (2010) and Shogren et al. (2012) were reading and writing goals.

Conclusion

There is clear evidence that employing autonomy-supportive teaching strategies, creating autonomy-supportive classrooms, and promoting self-determination and student self-directed learning can lead to enhanced self-determination, higher motivation to learn, enhanced skills, and improved outcomes, including reading and writing outcomes. Teachers can easily integrate instruction using strategies such as the self-regulated strategy development process or SDLMI to engage students in their own learning, facilitate self-determination, and improve school outcomes.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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