Abstract:

This work aims to show an educational research in high school classrooms, taken by students in the subject of Technology from the fourth year of Secondary Compulsory Education in the Spanish educational system.

The main goal of the study is to revise a part of the learning process, in reference to the student’s attitude and consciousness, allowing, as a main active element, to analyse their learning auto-regulation capabilities. The curricular context of the research was the implementation of Librecad lesson, based in a computed assisted design lesson.

Self-regulated learning is guessed one of the keys for a successful and effective education, providing metacognition skills in order to develop strategic actions in the students’ scaffolding learning process, increasing their autonomy and permitting the control of the elements that regulate the progression in a deep understanding of the subject.

In this way, the research carried out a prior revision of the students’ knowledge, a diagnostic assessment, in order to identify and examine what a student knew and could do, prior to the learning programme was implemented. Thus, the selected tool was the Knowledge Prior Study Inventory, known as “KPSI” (Tamir & Luneta, 1978). This instrument was performed two times: once at the beginning of the lesson and another at the end, in order to assess and verify the learning process development.

Furthermore, the KPSI reflected three dimensions of the background knowledge: cognition, process (know-how), and attitude. Furthermore, students have the possibility to introduce extra information.

After the implementation of these tools, we collected the data, completed an analysis and tested the previous hypotheses.

As conclusion we could appreciate that, on the one hand, the first KPSI performed provided useful information in order to set up an effective starting point, as well as, identify variables that conditioned the progression of the learning process. And, on the other hand, we also demonstrated hence the second KPSI, the helpfulness not only to provide a self-regulated learning process if not to achieve better academic outcomes, refining an adaptive teaching process and showing that there is evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards (Black & William, 1998).

References:
[1] Black, P. (2003). Assessment by teachers and the improvement of students’ learning. In: Fraser, B. & Tobin,
[2] Black, P; William, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment. Originally published by King’s College. Phi Delta Kappan.International: http://academic.sun.ac.za/mathed/174/formassess.pdf
[3] Meseguer S; Adsuara, L; Sousa, B; Fabra, Mª.J. (2011) L’avaluació com a reguladora del procés educatiu. I Congrés de Educación ciutat de Vila-real. CEFIRE Castelló, Ajuntament de Vila-real i Conselleria de Educación de la Generalitat Valenciana, 12 i 13 de març de 2011. ISBN 978-84-482-5633-3.
[4] Sanmartí, N. (2010). “L’avaluació per millorar els aprenentatges de l’alumnat en el marc del currículum per competències”. Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament d’Educació. Direcció General de l’Educació Básica i el Batxillerat.
[5] Tamir, P.; Lunetta, V. N. “An analysis of laboratory activities in the BSCS”. Yellow version, American Biology Teacher, 40, 426-428, 1978.
[6] Valle, A. et al. (2006) “Metas académicas, estrategias cognitivas y estrategias de autorregulación del estudio”. Psicothema, 18. (2)165-170.

Keywords:

Self-Regulation Learning, KPSI, Technology Learning, Teaching Methods, Diagnostic Assessment, Formative Assessment.