Journal of Educational Psychology Copyright 1997 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

1997, Vol. 89, No. 3, 397-410 0O22-O663/97/$3.00

Experimenting to Bootstrap Self-Regulated Learning

Philip H. Winne
Simon Fraser University

Modern theories of cognitive and constructive learning portray students as agents who set and
pursue goals. More effective students select among cognitive tactics they use to approach
goals and learn from false starts and setbacks. These students self-regulate not merely
performance but also how they learn. How do students develop forms for self-regulating
learning? The author suggests they experiment thereby bootstrapping newer forms of
self-regulated learning from prior forms. Experimenting is an arduous way to build knowledge
and it is subject to at least 3 obstacles that may be especially troublesome for young students:
obtaining sufficient practice with appropriate feedback, remembering how learning was
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enacted, and reasoning about factors that affect learning. The author examines these issues and
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suggests needs for future research that investigates how students develop forms of complex
goal-directed cognition that guide learning.

Parents and caregivers will readily affirm that even the
youngest students have a will and exercise it, sometimes
with too much volition, when they explore and learn. When
students adapt their approaches to learning, learning is
considered self-regulated. Self-regulated learning (SRL) is
implicit in many of educational psychology's contemporary
topics, including cognitive strategies, learning-to-learn, and
lifelong learning. Some researchers (e.g., see Schunk &
Zimmerman, 1994), including myself, credit SRL as consti-
tutive of success in learning, problem solving, transfer, and
academic success in general.
I (Winne, 1995) recently reviewed research to highlight
two relatively neglected attributes of SRL. First, SRL is not
always deliberate, complex, and metacognitive. Like other
skills, SRL can reach a level of expertise at which it is
enacted in automatic and simple form. Second, SRL is
grounded in and expressive of deeply seated knowledge,
skills, and beliefs integrated over an idiosyncratic history
with learning experiences. At a particular time, a student's
present state of history might be likened to a personal
paradigm for learning, that is, a framework of concepts that
characterize what learning is, methods for carrying it out,
and what it is for. I used these two attributes as premises in
drawing a controversial inference: Students do not learn to
be self-regulating—SRL is inherent in goal-directed engage-
ment
Suppose this inference is valid. Suppose also that educa-
tional institutions provide students with the information and
resources they need to reach educational objectives (an
This article is based on an invited address presented at the 1995
meetings of the European Association for Research on Learning
and Instruction, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Support for this
research was provided by grants from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-92-0293 and 410-95-
1046).
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Philip H. Winne, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, British Columbia V5A1S6, Canada. Electronic mail may
be sent via Internet to winne@sfu.ca.
obviously arguable assumption). If all students are continu-
ously self-regulating, then why do they differ so much in
their success in school? My answer is that students learn
varying forms of SRL. More successful students have
learned forms of SRL that less successful students have not.
If this hypothesis is plausible, several questions need
answers (see also Pressley, 1994): What facets make up
SRL? How do students manage learning when they self-
regulate? How can education help students develop more
effective forms of SRL? One question seems to underlie
these and others that might be raised.
How Do Students Learn Forms of SRL?
Students can learn new forms for SRL by being instructed
in them (e.g., Graham & Harris, 1994). Indeed, the experi-
mental literature is rich with studies demonstrating that
students of all ages can acquire and use tools for learning—
cognitive tactics and learning strategies—that are regulated
by forms of SRL. These cognitive tools are known to
contribute to learning in all the major subject areas taught in
schools (see Pressley & Woloshyn, 1995; Wood, Woloshyn,
& Willoughby, 1995). The research also indicates that
careful timing and adroit articulation of a large set of
interacting factors is required to teach students to use and
regulate cognitive tools successfully (e.g., see Pressley's,
1995, comment on Winne, 1995). Notably, young students
have not yet developed robust metamemory acquisition
procedures that help them develop understandings about
tactics and strategies they do use (see Pressley, Borkowski,
& O'Sullivan, 1984). Thus, unless they are explicitly taught
to use cognitive tools and to monitor the results of using
them, they typically fail to forge explicit, durable, and useful
knowledge about whether and how cognitive tools affect
learning.
Instruction of this complexity is extremely challenging to
realize in classrooms (see Pressley & El-Dinary, 1993).
Thus, it should not be surprising that studies of typical
classrooms indicate that students do not receive much
explicit instruction in academically effective forms of SRL

397
 398 WINNE
or the tools that SRL regulates (e.g., Durkin, 1978-1979;
Moely et al., 1992; Perry, 1997; Pressley, Wharton-
McDonald, Mistretta, & Echevarria, 1996). However, accord-
ing to the inference I referred to earlier, students nonetheless
self-regulate their engagement in academics. Where are
students learning the forms of SRL that they use, whatever
those forms may be? I suggest a simple but potentially
revolutionary answer: Students learn new forms of SRL
everywhere, including in their classrooms.
If students lack explicit instruction about SRL or receive
very little of it, then some of what they learn about SRL can
be gained by observing others. Whatever the prevalence of
this source may be, it seems likely that students will adapt
what they observe because, as I argue in this article, there are
reasons to predict a scarcity of students who can model
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effective forms of SRL.
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Another source for information about forms of SRL could
be experiments about learning that students themselves
design and carry out. Such experiments are trial-and-error
behavior that can take two very different shapes. In the first
shape, if students have a goal but lack a plan for approaching
it, investigations are "random" trial-and-error. In this case,
students recognize when an obstacle blocks progress, try a
different tactic for learning, and observe results. However,
students pursuing this form of investigation do not build on
those results; they do not use them to inform the design of
their next experiment in learning. Random trial-and-error
experimentation is exploratory and may broaden experience,
but it is not self-regulating.
The second shape of trial-and-error investigation involves
recursive planning. In recursively planned experimentation,
errors are perceived as information, and that information is
used to revise prior beliefs and to design future trials.
Recursive trial-and-error experimentation yields program-
matic results. It is one of humanity's most sophisticated and
successful methods of discovery, the scientific method.
When students recursively plan experiments about how to
learn, they engage in serially interpretive decision making
and reflective cognition (Butler & Winne, 1995). Figure 1
depicts what this process may be like. After a task has been
interpreted in terms of what students know and believe, the
model suggests they frame goals, select tactics or a strategy
they predict can reach those goals, apply those methods, and
observe what results. By monitoring the match between
attributes of those results and standards that describe what
they intended to produce, students internally generate infor-
mation that is fed back into the process. Students may also
monitor attributes of monitoring itself, generating informa-
tion about adapting that process of monitoring. Feeding
output generated in a prior cycle of cognition into subse-
quent cycles of engagement is what makes SRL recursive.
This model bears strong resemblance to a program of
experimental studies. Prior knowledge and beliefs serve as a
student's initial theory, couched in a historically developed,
personal paradigm about what learning is, methods for
learning, and how this view of learning can be updated by
new information. Goals correspond to hypotheses. Enacting
tactics "runs" the experiment, generating data. Analyzing
(monitoring) data relative to the paradigm and the specific
hypothesis generates information that students can use to
tune the paradigm and to frame designs for new experi-
ments. The purpose of all this seems to be furthering one's
power to explain, predict, and control—to learn more, to
avoid embarrassing consequences, or just to complete tasks
with minimal effort. If all students are inherently self-
regulating, as I have inferred, each is busy with a personal
program of empirical research, continuously revising and
extending earlier forms of SRL to elaborate and adapt a
personal paradigm about what learning is and how to do it
(Paris & Newman, 1990). In this view, SRL should be
modeled as a bootstrapped accomplishment.
Can Children Learn to Design
Informative Experiments?
As researchers, we can attest that designing valid and
informative experiments is challenging. If students experi-
ment with SRL to bootstrap more effective approaches to
learning, then it seems logical that students who are better at
designing and interpreting experiments should be more
successful in school. Like us, however, students ranging
from the elementary grades through adulthood are chal-
lenged to design informative experiments and validly inter-
pret them. Children's approaches to experimentation mag-
nify adults' shortcomings: searching problem spaces
unsystematically, failing to search all regions of a problem
space, slighting experiments that can reject factors that do
not function as causes in favor of experiments that test
factors believed a priori to be causal, designing experiments
that cannot provide data about intended comparisons, ignor-
ing evidence that experiments generate, sampling observa-
tions in ways that are biased toward initial and perhaps
invalid or incomplete models, forgetting previous results,
excessively vacillating in one's beliefs about factors in-
volved in covariation, mistaking covariation for causation,
or terminating a set of experiments before it is logically
possible to draw a valid conclusion (Burbules & Linn, 1988;
Kuhn, 1989; Ross, 1988; Schauble, 1990; Schauble, Klopfer,
&Raghavan, 1991).
Research, however, documents that students throughout
the developmental range (kindergarten to university) can be
taught core skills for experimenting, such as how to control
variables, provided they participate in "structured activities
that engage students in appropriately paced learning activi-
ties, characterized by explicit how-to-do-it instruction and
specific feedback" (Ross, 1988, p. 427; see also Kuhn,
Amsel, & O'Loughlin, 1988). Providing appropriately paced
learning activities, explicit how-to-do-it instruction coupled
with explicit invitations to consider experimental designs
and outcomes, and continuous specific feedback helps
students devise more effective experiments for bootstrap-
ping better forms of SRL (e.g., Schauble, 1990; Schauble et
al., 1991). If, however, these supports do not prevail in
school, then students' self-charted experimental programs in
search of forms of SRL that support successes in school are
probably more like the instruction experienced by students
in the control groups of the 65 studies that Ross reviewed.
Students in such contexts would have meager guidance
 BOOTSTRAPPING SELF-REGULATED LEARNING
External
feedback
Knowledge
coel
cue 2 Strategy
Knowledge
Multiple
MotimSoml
Bdkft
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Figure 1. A model of self-regulated learning displaying the profile of a goal, the current state of a
task's products, and a profile of discrepancies created by monitoring. From "A Metacognitive View
of Individual Differences in Self-Regulated Learning," by P. H. Winne, 1996, Learning and
Individual Differences, 8, p. 331. Copyright 1996 by JAI Press, Reprinted with permission.
about sequencing occasions for developing learning tactics
or pacing incremental elaborations of cognitive strategies.
Discussions about tactics and strategies that SRL regulates,
if there were any, would not be explicit. Feedback would be
predominantly self-generated and, depending on how stu-
dents and teachers co-constructed activities, externally avail-
able feedback might well be erratic and undermine the spirit
of experimentation (Clifford, 1991). Occasions to develop
reasons explaining the results students observed in their
experiments—if they observed them (Lodico, Ghatala, Levin,
Pressley, & Bell, 1983; Pressley, Levin, & Ghatala, 1984;
Paris & Newman, 1990)—would be relatively rare. In
classroom environments like this, one might hope that
students would observe peers to glean information about
forms of SRL; however, it appears that younger children
(second graders compared with seventh graders) do not
profit by watching peers who model cognitive tools and
occasions for using them (McGivern, Levin, Pressley, &
Ghatala, 1990). Because those peer models experience the
same environments as observers, any information about
forms of SRL they might display could well be lean,
ill-structured, or even counterproductive. Depending on the
social format of the classroom and the shape of its tasks,
occasions to observe may be infrequent.
If learning environments should have these characteris-
tics, according to my inference, then students are nonethe-
less self-regulating. Because their aptitude for designing
good (i.e., informative and valid) experiments in such
circumstances ranges from somewhat to substantially under-
developed across the age spectrum (Kuhn et al., 1988; Ross,
1988), it would not be surprising that productive forms of
399
Porfocmutco
profile of
discrepancies
- Cognitive System —
SRL might elude many students. In this article, I examine
select research to identify some of these challenges that
students may face if they are left mostly to their own devices
to bootstrap more productive forms of SRL. I begin by
introducing Carla, an imaginary second-grade student who
is working on a mathematics assignment in her classroom.
Carla COPES With an Arithmetic Worksheet
Carla sits at her desk, staring at p. 48 of Starting Points in
Mathematics 2 (Bornhold, Lindermere, & Tossell, 1982; see
Figure 2). At the top of the page is one simple instruction,
"Complete the number sentences." Below are rows of
pictures. Bach is accompanied by a symbolic representation
of a number sentence. For example, the first row has 10
boxes with a bold X through the last box. To the right of the
row of boxes is the symbolic expression, 10 - 1 = 9.
Only one example is completed. The next exercise has 10
archery targets in two rows of five targets each. The top and
bottom targets on the right have a bold X through them. Just
below the second row of targets is a symbolic expression of
just blank lines, _ - _ = _. The example suggests that Carla
should write numbers on those lines to represent what is
represented in the picture: 10 — 2 = 8. There are seven more
picture-based exercises like this. Notice that the exercises
are sequenced: 10 — 1, 10 - 2,10 - 3, and so on to 10 — 9.
At the bottom of the page are nine symbolic number
sentences, each of the form 10 — [number] = _ in apparently
no particular order.
 400
Complete the number sentences.
10-1= 9 in various domains.
AA
AAA
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10- 1 = 10 -A. 10 - 7
10-5 = 10 - 2 10 - 6
10-9 = 10 - 8 10-3 =
Figure 2. Exercises in subtraction. From Starting Points in
Mathematics 2 (p. 48), by D. L. Bornhold, L. Lindermere, and S.
Tossell, 1982, Scarborough, Canada: Prentice Hall Canada. Copy-
right 1982 by Prentice Hall Canada- Adapted with permission.
Tactics Are Tools for Enacting Learning
Suppose Carla knows that sometimes information pre-
sented in symbolic forms can be usefully translated into
graphic forms. For example, she might know that verbal
directions to find a treasure can be drawn as a map, and that
quantity can be translated as a slash located at a particular
place on a number line or represented as a set of graphics
(e.g., dots).
The manner of presentation in the work sheet reminds
Carla about the tactic for translating symbols into graphics
and implies how the tactic is specialized, by X-ing out some
of the graphics to handle symbolic number sentences about
subtraction, such as 10 - 4 = _. The tactic needs to be fused
with knowledge from the domain of arithmetic, specifically,
that the subtraction operation symbolically represented by a
minus sign can be translated into graphic form by drawing
an X through as many shapes as are specified by the number
to the right of the minus sign.
Tactics for learning are general rules for manipulating
information. They lie outside a particular domain, such as
arithmetic. Knowing a tactic implies three distinct kinds of
cognitive resources: (a) cognitive operations that manipu-
late information in a particular way; (b) understandings
about the product created by specific operations when they
WINNE
are enacted; and (c) beliefs about conditions under which a
tactic's products can be useful in addressing particular tasks
These three attributes describe a generic script for taking
action. This script has three slots waiting to be filled with the
particular information about a task: a conditions slot, an
operations slot, and a products slot. When Carla perceives
the specific conditions that characterize her task and enacts
particular cognitive operations to work on it, she creates
products for her arithmetic assignment. When Carla's particu-
lars fill the script's slots, Carla creates a specific instance of
this script, a process referred to as instantiating the generic
script for this task.
When Carla's tactical knowledge fuses with domain
knowledge, she perceives how arithmetic subtraction exer-
cises can be translated into graphic representations by
drawing Xs through pictures. If her arithmetic knowledge
includes the concept of reversibility, then she also perceives
how these two representations can be swapped back and
forth while preserving meaning. The new information cre-
ated by such cognitive processing almost always generates a
reaction. A peer may comment on Carla's numeric represen-
tation of a particular picture-number sentence. If she feels
tentative about her own answer, Carla might peek at a
friend's work sheet or she may apply some other tactic to
check her answer. To do that, she would instantiate condi-
tions, operations, and products slots in a script for monitor-
ing her work. For instance, she might draw on her knowl-
edge of reversibility to apply addition as a check on her
subtraction.
The information in these reactions, whether they originate
externally or internally, is feedback. For feedback to make
sense, Carla must have a profile of attributes or standards to
which a product can be compared (see Figure 1). Without a
standard, monitoring is impossible because there is no basis
for determining the correspondence between things. If
feedback is ubiquitous, then a slot should be added to the
script where the standards can be recorded. Another slot is
required to record the evaluation, the nature or degree of
match, that is generated when products are compared with
those standards.
I suggest that this five-slot script can characterize any
learner's engagement with any task. The script's slots refer
to conditions, both external and internal, under which
specific products of particular cognitive operations may be
realized; and information about how the product evaluates
relative to those standards. If the operations slot in the script
is instantiated with a procedure from outside the domain of a
task, as when Carla considered using graphical translations
of symbolic information, I classify the cognitive engage-
ment governed by such a script as a cognitive tactic.
To simplify references to this conditions-operations-
products-evaluation-standards script, I use a first-letter acro-
nym, COPES. By filling all five slots of this generic script
with perceptions about the task environment plus her
knowledge within and outside the domain of arithmetic,
Carla creates a tactic. The tactic is how she COPES with the
exercises on her work sheet in the context in which she is
working.
 BOOTSTRAPPING SELF-REGULATED LEARNING
Do Children Have COPES-Like Scripts for Learning?
The COPES script is closely paralleled in contemporary
models of children's memory for activities (Ratner & Foley,
1994). Both models acknowledge that people are agents.
They also claim that variations in the features of activities
(corresponding to different values that can fill slots in a
COPES script) provide a basis for people to transfer
knowledge and skills across domains of subject matter
Children as young as 3 years use such scripts as a basis for
action.
Students like Carla may have several COPES scripts that
could be used to work on the nine number sentences at the
bottom of the work sheet. Here are four tactics Carla might
know:
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1. Ask a peer or the teacher for help.
2. Use the picture-based exercises as opportunities to
abstract a principle about how to translate back and forth
between graphical and symbolic representations for number
sentences. Then answer the symbolic exercises by translat-
ing them into graphical representations and using the tactic
just practiced in the exercises on the top of the work sheet.
3. Use scrap paper to rehearse subtraction facts in the
form of 10 - [a number] without relying on a graphical
translation.
4. Because all nine symbolic expressions at the bottom of
the work sheet were presented graphically in the top section
of the work sheet, match exercises that are the same and
copy answers from the graphical exercises into the numeric
exercises.
How might Carla decide which tactic to use? Is there a
sequence to trying the tactics that would be strategic?
Raising and answering these two questions is a self-
regulating event. After deciding how she'll regulate her
approach, how might Carla design this experiment and use it
to help bootstrap new understandings about her form or
forms of self-regulation? Before attacking these issues, I
take up a prior question about students' opportunities to
conduct such experiments.
Do Students Have Occasion to Develop Expertise
With COPES Scripts for SRL?
Tactics are skills, and skills are acquired and honed
through practice. In areas as diverse as chess, music, dance,
and sports, expertise is known to develop in proportion to
practice (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993). Chil-
dren who attain elite status in such fields begin regular
practice at very early ages, 6 or 8 or 10 years, and
accumulate approximately 10,000 hours of practice by age
20. (Coincidentally, these ages correspond quite closely to
when children start school and choose an area or major for
in-depth academic study.)
Is expertise in SRL like expertise in areas such as chess,
music, dance, and sports? At today's stage of research into
SRL, an answer is moot empirically, though theoretically
expertise in SRL should parallel expertise in other domains.
Like other areas, SRL demands sensitive and articulate
coordination of a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills.
401
With extensive practice and feedback, such skills develop in
relatively separate stages (cognitive, associative, autono-
mous; Fitts, 1964) to create smooth and adaptive perfor-
mance in complex tasks (see Corno & Mandinach, 1983;
Winne, 1995). If, as Brown and Pressley (1994) claim,
self-regulation is "one of the most salient properties of any
form of expertise" (p. 155), then SRL itself might also
develop in the same pattern.
Do schoolchildren have enough practice to develop
expertise in SRL? To amass 10,000 hours of practice by age
18, a 6-year-old must practice every day for approximately
4.5 hours. Studies of academic learning time in classrooms
and of the time students spend on homework suggest
students fall quite short of this mark. Rosenshine (1979)
reported that students in second-grade classrooms were
actively engaged with academic tasks while experiencing a
relatively high success rate only about 1.6 hours per day.
This rose to about 2.2 hours per day in the fifth grade. Leone
and Richards's (1989) survey of students in Grades 5
through 9 found they spent an average of 6 hours a week on
homework. Even if second-grade students do as much
homework as their older peers, in-class and homework time
add up to only half of the practice that characterizes children
who become experts. Fifth graders practice only two thirds
as much as those on paths toward expertise.
To the extent these findings do characterize today's
schools, I hypothesize that one barrier to learning more
effective forms of SRL is lack of opportunity to practice
SRL. But practice alone is not likely to be adequate. The
kind of practice matters. Reiterating the theme of Ross's
(1988) description about scaffolding and resources children
need when learning to control experimental variables,
Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993) describe prac-
tice that leads to expertise as
a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to
improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome
weakness, and performance is carefully monitored to provide
cues for ways to improve it [...] deliberate practice requires
effort and is not enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to
practice because practice improves performance, (p. 368)
Bootstrapping effective forms of SRL demands enough
practice so that students can approach expertise. Further-
more, practice needs to accumulate, and this depends on
whether students are able to design series of experiments
about learning. A first step in this process requires students
to recall those prior episodes. In Carla's case, the work sheet
does not provide explicit support for that recall. We might
hope her teacher does, or that Carla has a portfolio of prior
arithmetic work that she realizes might be helpful to review.
If supports such as these are infrequent or absent, though,
children must rely on memory.
How Well Do Children Remember How They Learn?
The most thorough basis for designing a new experiment
about learning would involve examining all previously tried
alternative tactics that were judged relevant to a currently
instantiated COPES script. This seems unrealistic. What do
students like Carla remember about previous learning epi-
 402 WINNE
sodes? Although children's memories for events have been
actively investigated for approximately two decades (see
Nelson, 1986), I was able to find very little information
about qualities of schoolchildren's recall of learning events
in classroom settings (as opposed to many studies that
gathered students' memories about events but had no
independent evidence to corroborate what the students
recalled).
In one study, Marx and I (Winne & Marx, 1982)
interviewed fourth-, fifth-, and seventh-grade teachers and
some of their students. We invited teachers to watch a
videotape of a lesson they'd just taught and describe
cognitive tactics they intended students to use. We also
asked teachers to identify any cues they provided to mark
those occasions and to guide students' choices of tactics.
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With this information as a backdrop, we then showed the
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videotape to the teachers' students, asking for their interpre-
tations of teaching and learning, and their recollections of
how they participated cognitively in the lesson.
Teachers described their lessons as filled with cues they
intended students to recognize and act on. Students noticed
many of these cues when they watched the videotape. As
might be expected, their accuracy varied when we compared
the cognitive tactics students said they used with tactics their
teacher had intended them to use. We recorded quite a few
occasions when students described particular cues in the
lesson as routine, something typical of their teacher's
instructional patterns. Also, most students reminisced about
how cognitive tactics that these cues signaled were like
tactics they usually used, or they commented on how the cue
or tactic varied from a typical pattern.
These students did recall past instances when their teacher
had issued cues about cognitive tactics to use during lessons.
They also discriminated cognitive tactics as typical or not,
and matched typical tactics to specific cues. These data do
not describe whether students considered alternative cogni-
tive tactics in reply to a given cue. Recalling one instantiated
COPES script, however, creates an opportunity to adopt or
reject that tactic for engaging in classroom activities. This
dichotomous decision-making situation, to adopt a particular
tactic or reject it and search for another that is better suited to
goals, is Idle simplest context in which SRL is animated.
Situations of greater interest arise when students consider
several alternative tactics they have experienced over several
tasks. To my knowledge, there are no studies that directly address
this case in schools. A proxy, however, is available.
Kuebli and Fivush (1994) used school-like tasks, specifi-
cally, building toys, for 4- and 7-year-olds to study chil-
dren's memory for multistep tasks. In each of four sessions,
the experimenter gave very explicit, step-by-step instruc-
tions about how the child could make two toys by assem-
bling parts provided in a bin. After making a model bird in
nine steps, children built a puppet in the same number of
steps. At each step in each task, Kuebli and Fivush's
instructions explicitly mentioned the subgoal sought in that
step ("Now I want you to make the bird's tail"), and then
explicitly named the objects and actions that achieved that
subgoal ("Now take this string and tie the string in a knot
around the bunch of pipe cleaners at one end").
Half the children experienced four versions of a tactic—a
different action and different object or objects—to complete
a particular step in assembling the toy. For example, in the
first session, string was used to tie pipe cleaners together to
make the bird's tail. In the second session, the tactic for
making the tail was instantiated differently by using wire to
wind the pipe cleaners. Everything else—the actions and
objects in each of the other steps and the sequence of
steps—remained the same as in the first session. In the third
session, a third tactic was used to make the bird's tail, this
time stuffing the pipe cleaners through a hole in a wooden
bead. A fourth tactic was used to complete that step in the
fourth session.
The other half of the children assembled the bird and the
puppet the same way in the second session as they had in the
first. They practiced each tactic (each step) twice. In Session
3, they were asked to use a new tactic to complete one of the
nine steps in each task, and they practiced it again in Session
4. These children experienced fewer variations in tactics, but
they got to practice each of those variations twice.
Kuebli and Fivush's (1994) study parallels Carla's situa-
tion in this way. The four alternative tactics Carla is
considering using to complete her work sheet are tactics she
has experimented with before. To decide among them, she
must first remember them. Is Carla likely to recall all four
tactics or only a subset of them? What information about the
tactics will she recall?
Kuebli and Fivush (1994) asked children to return for a
fifth session where they were asked and subsequently probed
about "What happens when you come to the playroom? Tell
me everything you remember" (p. 30). Following this, the
children were asked specifically to describe the steps they
had experienced at the step where they used different tactics.
They also were asked, "Do we always do it that way?" (p.
30). Three findings suggest important information about
what children can recall about different tactics they may
experiment with in tasks.
First, in the absence of direct prompting about the steps,
4-year-olds recalled an average of slightly more than four
(46%) of the nine steps; 7-year-olds recalled an average of
six and a half steps (73%). Even after four practice sessions,
if students were trying to experiment with these tactics, the
experiments they might design would surfer by a lack of
consideration about steps they forgot. Ensuing interpreta-
tions about which tactics were successful would probably be
biased.
Second, the experimenters designed both assembly tasks
so that, if in Step 3 making the bird involved using a
different tactic in each of the four sessions, then the tactic for
completing Step 3 in the puppet-making task was the same
across all four sessions. Comparing children's spontaneous
recall of Step 3 in the bird-making task with their recall of
Step 3 in the puppet-making task measures the children's
memory for that step as a function of whether they used
different tactics versus just one. Table 1 displays these
findings. At both ages, children were more likely to recall a
step if they had addressed it using a different tactic in each of
the four episodes. This would be helpful to students experi-
menting about SRL because the purpose of such experiment-
 BOOTSTRAPPING SELF-REGULATED LEARNING
Table 1
Probability of Recalling a Step After Four Episodes Using
Four Different Tactics Versus an Invariant Tactic
Participants Four different tactics Same tactic
4-year-olds .63 .21
7-year-olds .90 .60
ing is discovering how variations in tactics make a differ-
ence; however, there's a catch.
If children spontaneously recalled that they had used four
different tactics, what did they remember about those
different tactics? The children's descriptions were examined
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for mention of the different objects and different actions that
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distinguished between tactics. "Overall, mention of two or
more alternatives was rare; when children mentioned particu-
lar [objects or actions] they were apt to mention only one
from the set [of four]" (Kuebli & Fivush, 1994, p. 36). For
the step they remembered the best, 4-year-olds could recall
only 12% of those tactic's parts and 7-year-olds remembered
only 17%. Had students forgotten the different tactics? Not
entirely. With prompting, memory about the different objects
and actions rose to 40% for 4-year-olds and 67% for
7-year-olds.
Finally, even a single chance to practice a tactic made a
difference. Among children who repeated a tactic just once,
recall of objects and actions averaged 21%. This was four
times greater than the overall average of 5% among children
who had used a different tactic in each of the four episodes.
These two studies allow a faint sketch to be drawn of
children's capabilities to remember alternative tactics they
have experimented with in prior episodes of learning. Such
memories provide the alternatives to be monitored, setting
the stage to enact SRL. The study Marx and I (Winne &
Marx, 1982) did indicates that a rich and elaborate prompt,
the videotape of a just-experienced lesson, could trigger
upper elementary students' memories about tactics for
learning they had used about a half-hour ago in lessons.
These students were aware of variations in the typicality of
teachers' cues and tactics coupled to those cues. Findings
from Kuebli and Fivush's (1994) study indicate that children
4 to 7 years old seem much more likely to remember a step
within a larger task if they had tried several tactics to
accomplish that step. But, without prompts, what these
young students can recall about different tactics is very
limited. In other words, they have very little memory for
how they instantiated the operations slot of a COPES script.
When they do recall, they tend to remember only the most
recent version of the various tactics they had used. These
limitations of memory are all the more significant given the
concreteness of events and the immediacy of feedback in
this context. Concreteness and immediate external feedback
usually provide significant advantages to recognizing and
remembering.
What does this sketch suggest about young students'
self-directed explorations for new and more effective forms
of SRL? It predicts that children will have difficulty
establishing a progressive program of research. This is not
403
because they necessarily lack cognitive tactics—simple
cognitive tactics such as rehearsing and organizing informa-
tion are available to preschoolers (see Bjorklund, 1995)—
and it is not that the children have no memory about
variations in the tactics they have previously used in a task.
Prior versions of tactics can be recognized and reasonably
well remembered provided that (a) the tactics have been
experienced many times (over most of the school year) and
(b) there is a rich prompt, such as a videotape that reinstates
the scene, or a person to pose questions. Lacking such
supports, children may remember constituents of only the
last tactic they tried, forgetting earlier versions. If, for some
reason, they should venture a new tactic, they may well
forget the tactic used just one episode ago. Other studies
corroborate a similar pattern in trying to solve problems
(e.g., Burbules & Linn, 1988) or discover rules to explain
causal systems (Schauble, 1990). It matches the random
sense of trial-and-error experimenting rather than the model
of recursively planned research. If teachers, textbooks,
peers, or parents do not provide consistent and informative
external prompts, young students will probably lack informa-
tion they need to bootstrap more effective forms of SRL.
Even when that information is provided consistently, pat-
terns for exploring it remain quite disorganized (Schauble,
1990).
Carla may well face this kind of challenge. As depicted in
Figure 2, there is no prompt for her to remember alternative
ways to instantiate the operations slot in a COPES-formatted
tactic. If there were, there is not room on the page to write or
draw or otherwise characterize what she may remember. If
she should umake room," my experience suggests Carla's
teacher might comment that her work is not neat or focused.
Over the long term, such conditions might depress Carla's
enthusiasm for experimenting with learning. At the least,
common classroom conditions do not support progressively
bootstrapping new, more adaptive forms of SRL.
How Do Children Choose Cognitive Tactics?
Models of goal-directed behavior, including models of
SRL, require that learners monitor their behavior relative to
standards that describe the goals they seek, as displayed in
Figure 1. When tasks unfold over several steps, monitoring
can occur after the task has been completed or it may be
applied at points "inside" the task, called subgoals. A
feature often associated with goal-directed behavior is that it
is guided by a plan. That is, rather than apply tactics to a task
"thoughtlessly," the learner deliberately analyzes the task
and predicts how it might play out. In doing so, subgoals are
identified before actions are taken. If the task is complex,
subgoals and tactics that accomplish them may be organized
into a pattern that satisfies some criterion the learner holds
for moving from step to step in the task.
Planning is a deliberate activity that, among other things,
establishes subgoals for monitoring engagement with a task.
However, monitoring that serves goal-directed behavior is
not always planned in the sense that subgoals are identified
before engaging with a task. Monitoring can also occur if
there is no explicit plan (Winne, 1995). Such opportunistic
 404
monitoring is theorized to be the result of automated tactics
that operate without deliberation and that trigger attention
only when the information they monitor contravenes stan-
dards that are tacit (see Anderson, 1991; McKoon & Ratcliff,
1992). Regardless of whether monitoring is planned or
opportunistic, it produces information about the state of a
task, and that information is the basis for self-regulation
(Butler & Winne, 1995; Carver & Scheier, 1990; Winne,
1982,1985,1995).
In terms of a COPES script, two kinds of goals can be
monitored. The first concerns qualities of operations that
create products; the second characterizes the products that
operations create (see Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994, p.
847). In protocols from many think-aloud studies, there is
evidence that students differentiate cognitive operations they
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claim to use while performing academic tasks. For example,
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in a study of students' cognitive processing in classrooms
(Winne & Marx, 1982), Marx and I cataloged a variety of
tactics. In one instance, students asked by their teacher to
generate a hypothesis about the relation between two
variables recognized that this involved them in thinking
about prior content (searching) and explaining why the
hypothesis was tenable (monitoring the hypothesis against
standards provided by principles that governed the causal
system the students were studying). The capability to
describe and evaluate these cognitive operations is metacog-
nition, a prominent feature in most contemporary models of
learning (e.g., Bandura, 1989). For instance, suppose the
student just mentioned had indicated that the cue used for
searching memory was not yielding useful information. This
indicates metacognitive monitoring. Metacognitive control
would be evident if the student then initiated a secondary
search for concepts that were related to that first cue, and
described this as a tactic for generating new cues that could
be used to recommence the primary search.
Will a Task's Difficulty Affect Self-Regulation ?
Processes, mechanical ones as well as cognitive tactics,
have three attributes that can serve as standards against
which to monitor them: (a) the number of distinguishable
operations (steps) that make up a tactic, (b) the time it takes
to carry out the set of operations that comprise a tactic, and
(c) the probability a tactic creates a product that meets preset
standards. In addition to conditions a learner perceives to
surround a task, I suggest these three attributes contribute to
a learner's perception about how difficult cognitive process-
ing is. A tactic that uses a single, fast, reliable cognitive
operation is easy (if it is recognized at all; McKoon &
Ratcliff, 1992; Winne, 1995). Carla might view rehearsing
the definition of the minus symbol for subtraction as
matching this profile of standards. A tactic having any other
profile of complexity, speed, and reliability has a measure of
difficulty or poses a degree of challenge. A likely case is
Carla's second option for a tactic to use in completing her
work sheet, abstracting a principle for translating between
graphical and symbolic representations.
Do young students estimate the difficulty of a task and use
that prediction metacognitively to regulate engagement?
WINNE
The answer is yes (see Bjorklund, Gaultney, & Green,
1994). It is well documented that children overestimate their
capabilities, although the discrepancy between their predic-
tions about success and actual performance lessens as they
mature (see Nicholls, 1990). Also, younger children conflate
concepts of ability and effort, holding an incremental view
of ability under which predicted achievement is proportional
to effort (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). These findings, and my
own unsystematic observations that parents and caregivers
often explain failure or slow progress in terms of task
difficulty, suggest that preschool children have a well-
established concept of difficulty and are regularly encour-
aged to use it to explain degrees of success.
What do perceptions of difficulty contribute to self-
regulation? Klayman (1985) observed sixth graders as they
tackled classification tasks that were designed to vary the
number of cognitive operations required to classify accu-
rately. Not surprisingly, the children did regulate tactics as a
function of the number of operations required in the tasks.
What was surprising is that they opted for less difficult
cognitive tactics (i.e., tactics that required fewer cognitive
operations) even though the children observed that those
tactics were less effective. Klayman interpreted that the
success of a tactic was less an influence on the children's
choices among tactics than was a tactic's difficulty. I
interpret this finding in terms of relative incentives. Accu-
racy alone did not define the incentive in this task. Children
sought a satisficing balance between accuracy and effort.
A different interpretation of Klayman's findings is that
younger children may set lenient standards for monitoring
the successes they achieve by using alternative tactics
(Bjorklund et al., 1994). By setting lower standards for
success than older students, younger students may grant
themselves an advantage. If they do decide to try a
challenging tactic, lower standards allow them to classify
products as successes where we would see slight but
consistent failure (Bjorklund & Green, 1992). Because
younger children adopt less stringent standards, they may
continue to practice the challenging tactic, because it was the
last one they tried and they perceive it as successful. The
gateway to progressive bootstrapping of SRL is choosing the
more difficult tactic in the first place. Klayman's study
suggests that such choices, near the leading edge of the
student's zone of proximal development, may not be made.
Obviously, this family of conjectures should be examined
further in the context of academic tasks and tactics such as
Carla's.
Do Beliefs Affect Choices Among Tactics?
In Figure 1, students' beliefs are depicted as one facet in a
muJtifaceted filter affecting the goals a student frames. When
monitoring feeds back information about how to self-
regulate by refraining goals, these beliefs contribute to that
process. Schommer (1994) documented that high school and
university students hold well-defined, deep-seated epistemo-
logical beliefs about factors such as the complexity, speed,
and reliability of tactics. One belief Schommer described
has five main elements (Schommer, Grouse, & Rhodes,
 BOOTSTRAPPING SELF-REGULATED LEARNING
1992). The first four are learning is a process that occurs
quickly, mastery is a state that ought to be achieved on the
first try or it will not be reached, hard work is unnecessary
for success, and concentrated effort is a waste of time. The
fifth element of this composite belief is significant: It is not
possible to learn how to learn. Students whose perceptions
of learning are tinged with this composite belief would be
predicted to develop forms of self-regulation that are
counterproductive. This hypothesis has been confirmed
(with undergraduates; Schommer et al., 1992). This belief
was negatively related to achievement in Schommer et al.'s
sample and, notably, correlated with students* decisions to
study using shallow methods for studying.
If Carla holds a belief like this, it seems quite improbable
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she would adopt a tactic as cognitively demanding as
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developing an abstract principle. Rehearsing number facts
might be easier, but it still requires effort, as does matching
the pictorial exercises to symbolic number sentences. Would
she choose to ask for help, predicting that she could bypass
deep processing herself? Now that correlations between
students* self-reports of regulation of tactics and their
achievement are well-established (Pintrich, Wolters, & Bax-
ter, in press), we need research that penetrates correlations.
What is the conditional probability that a student chooses a
particular tactic as the means for engaging a particular task?
Estimating this kind of relation rests on first knowing what
goal the student seeks.
How Do Children's Goals Originate?
Models of self-regulation assume that learners "accept"
and adapt assignments rather than being programmed by
assignments (Butler & Winne, 1995; Winne & Hadwin, in
press; Winne & Marx, 1989; Winne & Perry, 1994). That is,
students always generate their own goals, some of which
may perfectly match those assigned and others of which will
not. How might Carla generate a goal when she approaches
the last section of her work sheet that poses problems about
numerical number sentences?
My model of goal generation has several steps. First,
Carla constructs her representation of what these new tasks
are. In line with much research and theory, this construction
is a mix of bottom-up processing, where data are sampled
from her environment, and top-down processing, by which
Carla's existing knowledge shapes perceptions about what
the new task is. This bottom-up and top-down processing
creates information that fills slots of COPES scripts, creating
representations of tactics Carla has available for approach-
ing the exercises.
Each time Carla fills in the product slot and the evaluation
slot in a COPES script, I conjecture that her memory system
automatically (Anderson, 1991; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992)
creates an outcome expectation. An outcome expectation is
Carla's prediction about what product or products will be
created if operations described in the script are enacted
under the conditions Carla perceives to surround the task.
Once an outcome expectation is framed, it becomes a basis
on which automatic memory operations retrieve three other
memories that augment each of Carla's COPES scripts.
405
The topic of one of those automatically retrieved memo-
ries is values or consequences Carla has experienced when
she or others (peers, the teacher) use the script's standards to
evaluate the product she predicts this tactic will create.
These are incentives Carla associates with the tactic. Next,
on the basis of information Carla placed in the script's
conditions and evaluations slots, Carla's memory automati-
cally estimates her capability to perform cognitive process-
ing instantiated in the script's operations slot This forms an
efficacy expectation. The outcome expectation, incentive or
incentives, and the efficacy expectation stimulate a fourth
memory about agency (Bandura, 1989). Its topic is an
attribution that explains why this tactic applied to tasks like
this leads to success or failure as a function of ability, effort,
difficulty of tasks like this, or luck (Weiner, 1986; see also
Winne & Perry, 1994).
Thus, as Carla instantiates slots in a COPES script, she
creates a "cold" rational tactic for solving number sen-
tences. In parallel, her memory automatically augments that
script with motivationally "hot" (Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle,
1993) information: an outcome expectation, incentives, an
efficacy expectation, and attributions. Each tactic that Carla
instantiates is characterized by this complex bundle of
information, and those bundles are the objects Carla exam-
ines to decide which tactic is best for her. The overall
standing that Carla assigns to each tactic is its utility (Baron,
1994; Winne & Marx, 1989). Models of decision making
(Baron, 1994) as well as empirical studies of children's
decisions to use cognitive tactics (see Pressley et al., 1984)
suggest that Carla chooses the tactic with the greatest utility
(Figure 3). The cognitive act of choosing one among
alternative tactics creates a goal: Enact the chosen tactic.
Because Carla had instantiated four alternative tactics, this
judgment to enact one of those tactics marks the first step in
a self-regulated event.
I use another first-letter acronym, AEIOU (attributions,
efficacy expectations, incentives, outcome expectations,
tftility; Winne & Marx, 1989), to label these topics that, as a
result of automatic memory processes, augment a tactic with
motivational information about relations between COPES
slots. Is there evidence for an AEIOU model? I do not review
here (see Bjorklund, 1995) widespread and well-regarded
evidence that school-age children do predict outcomes,
estimate (actually overestimate) efficacy, perceive different
incentives for various tasks, and make attributions about
their agency (typically regarding effort). Two significant
questions that beg examination are how young children
estimate utility on the basis of the bundle of COPES +
AEIOU information they construct, and whether their esti-
mates serve them well in bootstrapping more effective forms
ofSRL.
Do Children Accurately Estimate Utility?
Expectations in the AEIOU model describe the probabil-
ity that two events are related. For example, to generate an
outcome expectation, Carla samples memories of past
experiences in which COPES scripts were instantiated
similarly to their forms for the task she is working on now.
 406 WINNE
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Figure 3. Utility for multiple tactics as an integrated function of
outcome expectation, efficacy expectation, incentive, and attribu-
tion about agency.
For each tactic in her sample, the relation between enacting
that tactic and outcomes can be modeled as a 2 X 2
contingency table (Figure 4). This is formally equivalent to
correlating data about the use of a tactic with data about
outcomes.
There is abundant evidence that estimating correlations or
making judgments like this is challenging for almost every-
one (Baron, 1994). Kuebli and Fivush's (1994) study also
demonstrates that children with a history of using alternative
tactics in a task tend to trim the population of alternatives
they recall. Moreover, it should be noted that children in that
study experienced certain (i.e., nonprobabilistic) relations
between operations and products. Had relations been proba-
bilistic, as they are almost sure to be in authentic learning
tasks where tactics per se are being honed alongside the
development of subject matter knowledge, estimating corre-
lations between tactics and their outcomes would be even
more challenging.
What happens when children search memory for informa-
tion to fill a 2 X 2 contingency table like Figure 4? Shaklee
and Goldston (1989) reported that third and seventh graders,
as well as university students, suffer a strong sampling bias
when they seek information about contingency relations.
Events in cell A, the cell of positive co-occurrences, are
readily recalled whereas events falling in cells B, C, and D
are undersampled. This bias is common throughout the
developmental continuum (Shaklee, Holt, Elek, & Hall,
1988).
Some correlations can be accurately inferred using samples
that are biased this way. But underrepresentation of informa-
tion about Cells B and C will systematically lead learners
away from accurate self-regulation because this bias limits
possibilities to disconfirm an expectation. Many studies
indicate that people tend to ignore information in Cells B
and C, suffering what has been labeled an attentional bias.
Unfortunately, people also tend to hold tenaciously to
misconceptions about the prevalence of cell A (Chinn &
Brewer, 1993), making it all the more difficult for them to
entertain information in cells B and C.
In combination, the truncated recall of alternative tactics
that Kuebli and Fivush (1994) observed plus the effects of
sampling bias may partially explain two frequent empirical
observations. One is why judgments about relations between
cognitive tactics and their products often deviate from
normative models. This is because expectations are derived
from biased samples. The second is the production defi-
ciency (situations where students who know a tactic fail to
use it) wherein students may truncate recall of tactics or, if
they do recall instances of cell D, do not assign them high
utility. Both circumstances undermine the informativeness
of experiments that could bootstrap SRL. I set aside issues
about bias in sampling memories to focus on issues concern-
ing contingency judgments with whatever sample is at hand
or, more appropriately, "in mind."
What might explain the prevalence of crippled approaches
to judging correlation? A partial answer may be found in
research that has investigated how people test theories. In
one prominent line of work, Kuhn and her colleagues (Kuhn,
1991; Kuhn, Amsel, & O'Loughlin, 1988) involved fifth and
sixth graders, ninth graders, and college students in evaluat-
ing evidence. In the first session, students were asked to state
hypotheses about what they believed caused people to have
colds and what did not. These hypotheses express a probabi-
listic covariance relation and are formally the same as
outcome expectations and efficacy expectations in the AEIOU
model. Subsequently, the researchers presented students
with rigged samples of data so that some matched a student's
hypothesis about what causes colds and others matched the
student's hypothesis about what did not cause colds. Also
embedded in the data students saw were two other potential
causes of colds that students had not named before. One
correlated perfectly with having colds and the other was
statistically independent of catching a cold.
Students were not asked to judge whether the data they
saw supported their initial hypotheses about what did and
did not cause colds. Instead, they were queried about a more
fundamental matter: What did they think the evidence
indicated by itself? This is a very different question than
whether samples of data confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis
about covariation. According to canons for testing theories,
answers to what evidence indicates by itself should be
independent of prior hypotheses about what does or does not
cause colds.
Except for one group of college students (philosophy
students), most students treated instances falling in cell A of
a contingency table as an "obviously" true proposition
Product Is Produced Produoi Ii Not PIOQBCM
Operation (Tactic) Is Executed A B
Operation (Tactic) Is Not Executed C D
Figure 4. An outcome expectation represented as a problem in
judging covariation.
 BOOTSTRAPPING SELF-REGULATED LEARNING
rather than a test of a yet-to-be validated hypothesis. When
data fell into cells B or C, data that challenged a student's
earlier hypotheses, students did not see it that way. Instead,
they distorted the evidence, ignored it, or engaged in a
practice that the philosopher of science Lakatos claimed is
prevalent among scientists in general: Students modified
auxiliary beliefs to protect their original hypothesis (see also
Schauble, Klopfer, & Raghavan, 1991). Kuhn (1989, 1991)
interpreted that these unscientific practices arise mainly
because students did not or could not view data as informa-
tion independent from their preexisting hypotheses.
These invalid approaches to examining data about covari-
ance relations may help to explain a puzzling observation
about the development and use of cognitive tactics, and
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simultaneously highlight an important feature about practice
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that bootstraps effective SRL. Miller and Seier (1994)
reviewed research in which it was demonstrated that stu-
dents will continue to use a new tactic even when perfor-
mance declines for a short period (see Figure S). They called
this phenomenon a utilization deficiency.
Among several plausible causes of a utilization deficiency
(e.g., setting low standards for success), Miller and Seier
(1994) favored the argument that students are inept at
noticing the initial decline in performance. Why might this
happen? Children often are unrealistically optimistic, some-
times perceiving the effort they put into a task as a more
valid indicator of achievement than achievement itself. If
actual achievement might indicate that a tactic's utility is
more like cell B than cell A in Figure 4, as Kuhn observed,
the achievement data may be ignored, distorted, or buffered
by adjusting auxiliary hypotheses. The prior and auxiliary
hypothesis that is handy is that more effort is needed. By
holding too strongly to a prior belief (hypothesis) that a new
tactic is beneficial, the student's judgment about the new
tactic's utility is distorted by a faulty attribution to effort.
This approach to wrongly estimating utility may be
variously labeled a disposition, a learning style, a volitional
style, a disability, or simply a deficiency in skills for testing
theories. However one chooses to label it, it actually may be
a boon in bootstrapping better SRL. By "missing opportuni-
ties" to weaken an outcome expectation, young children
may continue to practice a usefiil tactic until it achieves
automaticity. This could be genuinely adaptive (Anderson,
1991) provided the student does not start out with a strong
belief in an academically detrimental form of SRL, such as a
self-handicapping tactic (Covington, 1992) to avoid study-
ing so there is a ready excuse for failure. Students who start
out with misguided tactics nonetheless bootstrap an updated
form of SRL, but one that undermines academically effec-
tive engagement in tasks.
What will Carla do? Which of the four tactics in her
sample will she judge has the greatest utility? Making a
plausible prediction would require that I lengthen this article
with considerably more invented data about Carla's history
with each tactic, her perceptions about each tactic's utility,
and the variety of individual differences that contribute to
forming those perceptions. The COPES + AEIOU model
includes information of very broad scope woven in a
complex pattern. It probably should not be otherwise in
407
No Initial Law Later Later
Tactic Use UK Ute Uie
Stages of Competence with a Tactic
Figure 5. Performance initially declines after a tactic is first
acquired, producing a utilization deficiency.
cases where science seeks accounts of how people metacog-
nitively adapt their own behavior.
Summary and a Modest Agenda for Research
We now understand relatively well how to teach students
about cognitive tools—learning tactics and cognitive strate-
gies—to use when learning solo and collaboratively (e.g.,
see Pressley, El-Dinary, Marks, Brown, & Stein, 1992). Key
features of such teaching include using effective teaching
methods in the first place, providing students with condi-
tional knowledge that triggers appropriate use of the tool,
ensuring students understand a tool's utility, and involving
students in monitoring their practice when they use tools.
When students receive such instruction and self-regulate
their use of these tools, they boost comprehension, enhance
recall and enhance motivation, and improve volition for
learning (Pressley, 1995). Although there are few studies, it
seems that classroom learning environments do not provide
as much explicit instruction of this kind as they might (e.g.,
Durkin, 1978-1979; Moely et aL, 1992; Perry, 1997; Press-
ley et al., 1996).
If students do not receive explicit instruction in cognitive
tools and effective forms of SRL, I suggest they will
inherently bootstrap their own forms of SRL. Skills that are
essential in designing valid individual experiments and in
developing a progressive line of experimentation will often
elude students unless they are taught them. To develop
expertise in skills that underlie effective bootstrapping, as
well as with cognitive tactics and strategies that SRL
regulates, students need extensive practice with appropriate
feedback. I suggest it will prove useful to investigate how
well school and university curricula support this require-
ment and to explore new technologies (e.g., see Winne,
1992) that may help teachers track and guide students*
growth on these fronts.
Scientists are renowned for carefully recording musings,
data, and interpretations. They depend on external storage
devices—lab notebooks, computers, and file cabinets—to
overcome memory's inherent limitations on filing, articulat-
ing, and retrieving volumes of information. Young students
pursuing self-defined programs of research on SRL face the
 408
same challenges. Journals* paper or electronic, and the social
memory that collaborating peers can provide over the course
of genuine projects may help meet these challenges, al-
though it seems that children prefer to rely on memory and
rarely record plans and data necessary for bootstrapping
valid models (Schauble, 1990). We need to know much more
about how students can be guided to record, share, analyze,
and revise metacognitively useful information (e.g., see
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994).
Like scientists, students experimenting with SRL work
within budgets that constrain the scope of their studies.
Overwhelming anecdotal evidence indicates that an impor-
tant line item in students' budgets is task difficulty. Some
perceptions about the difficulty of tactics and strategies seem
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to guide students away from productive practice. It be-
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hooves us to know more about how students develop
perceptions of difficulty and how they update those percep-
tions as tasks unfold over minutes, lessons, and units of
study. Such research should elaborate a concept of difficulty
beyond being a normative or absolute property of a task,
such as a psychometric difficulty index or a count of steps, to
one addressing its information value in SRL.
Another feature shared between scientists' work and
students' experimentation is a tension created by seeking
knowledge within a paradigm. Some features of students'
epistemologies that describe what is possible, what evidence
is, what evidence is for, and whether particular information
is worth seeking may bias their searches for more effective
forms of SRL. There is much more to understand about
beliefs that students hold, and how they sustain and change
them (Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle, 1993). The developmental
character of all of these topics suggests that future research
should turn its focus to students early in their school careers
and follow them longitudinally.
Conclusion
When calls are made to prepare students for lifelong
learning, forms of SRL are added to already long lists of
educational goals. Forms of SRL also play a role as powerful
individual differences that affect how students perceive
educational objectives and participate in and co-construct
learning (see Winne, 19%). By modeling SRL in terms of
recursive information processing, COPES scripts, and AEIOU
relations, I aimed to expose some ways in which SRL is
simultaneously complex and fragile. The model also acknowl-
edges explicitly that SRL is plastic. As students practice
rules that identify, articulate, and apply cognitive tools and
external resources to approach goals, they extend the scope
of their competence by bootstrapping more adaptive and
resilient forms of SRL.
Some may complain that the kind of SRL I describe
belittles context and obscures historical, social, cultural, and
institutional factors that mediate cognitive development. I
suggest it does not. Each individual is, by nature and by
learning, sensitive to the environment and some of its
features. The nature and degree of sensitivity are potent
individual differences that mediate the effect of information
resources, both planned and unplanned, that educational
WINNE
institutions provide students. Describing SRL as a person-
ally evolving paradigm about learning recognizes that forms
of SRL, like scientific paradigms, take shape within a
learning community. Enfolded in each student's personal
paradigm for learning is information about and influence
from teachers, textbook authors, developers of educational
software, parents and caregivers, peers, and past tasks.
Within this complex context, I attribute agency to students.
As agents, students decide what they adapt to and, within
boundaries of external constraints, select how they will
adapt. At the same time, they shape the context to which they
adapt, closing the loop of reciprocal determinism. The
model I present equates one expression of students' agency
to forms of SRL.
I wondered, What if children adapt how they learn by
experimenting to bootstrap their own new forms of SRL? To
explore this question, I modeled the development of SRL as
a process of designing and interpreting experiments. An
anonymous reviewer took exception to this approach be-
cause it "seems to assume that the definition of 'learner' is
one who is trying to learn, and who is looking for ways to
learn better. I don't think that's necessarily (or even usually)
the case."
Self-regulation is an attempt to improve on an unsatisfy-
ing state, or to preserve a state that is perceived better than
other states into which a person might slip. I (Winne, 1995)
and others (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1990) have argued that
SRL is inherent in goal-directed activity, that is, activity that
"looks" for "better" states. I perceive the reviewer's
concern pivots on what was meant by the words looking and
better.
The word look conveys a deliberate stance, loosely, an
intentional, "conscious" act of seeking. Self-regulation need
not be deliberate in this sense (Anderson, 1991; McKoon &
Ratcliff, 1992; Winne, 1995).. It can be carried out tacitly,
"unconsciously," with a degree of automaticity that does not
elevate it to a position of cognitive inspectability. To the
extent this empirical and theoretical proposition is tenable, I
believe that SRL is not necessarily "looking" for ways to
learn better in the sense I interpret the reviewer's comment.
In my model, when labeling an approach to learning or a
product of learning as "better," I suggest the labeler avoid
chauvinism. Nothing requires students' cognitive operations
or their achievements to coincide with anyone else's goals or
preferences. Neither operations nor products must be opti-
mal in any sense other than meeting a student's standards.
For example, not studying so as to have a personally and
socially acceptable excuse for failure is ,a common self-
handicapping tactic (Covington, 1992). Some learners "look"
for or perpetuate what we might label a "dysfunctional"
approach like this because they deem it "better" than
alternatives, such as having to assume responsibility for
failing even after applying considerable effort, or inferring
that ability is low if considerable effort must be applied to a
task in the first place.
Finally, it merits repeating that a model stands for a
phenomenon, but it is not that phenomenon. For example,
the mathematical process of averaging models the operation
of a pan balance but computing an average does not balance
 BOOTSTRAPPING SELF-REGULATED LEARNING
pans. Although I modeled SRL as a process of bootstrapping
by designing and interpreting experiments, it is clearly an
empirical question how accurately this model maps onto to
reality. If that mapping is sufficiently accurate, the research I
reviewed here suggests paths to follow in "bettering"
students' development of SRL according to our objectives
for education.
In sum, the research synthesized here and elsewhere
(Butler & Winne, 1995; Winne, 1995) suggests that young
students may be mightily challenged to bootstrap productive
forms of SRL on their own. Alongside a host of elements
that seem common to their personal paradigms for learning,
fundamental qualities of human cognition, such as how
memory works (Anderson, 1991) and how judgments are
formed (Baron, 1994), affect the processes that underlie
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
bootstrapping. Some of these qualities, such as limited
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
capabilities to recall the findings of prior experiments, can
be detrimental; others, such as leniency in evaluating
success, may be beneficial. We need to know more about
how such factors affect self-directed cognitive development
in solo and collaborative settings for learning. To the extent
we choose to view students as agents who design at least
some of their own education and who animate those designs
as forms of SRL, we also must strive to design education that
accommodates inherent qualities of cognition such as those I
described.
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Received September 24,1996
Revision received January 24, 1997
Accepted January 28, 1997 •