A Digital Tool to Support Self-Regulated Learning in Academic Writing

Abstract

The capacity to plan, manage, monitor and reflect on one’s learning—i.e. to engage in self-regulated learning (SRL)—is vital to academic success; seminal research identified fourteen SRL strategies and showed that learners’ achievement was strongly predicted by their use of SRL strategies (Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons, 1986); this difference in achievement can be accounted for by strategy presence, frequency and consistency (Nandagopal and Ericsson, 2012). Empirical evaluations indicate that most SRL tools do not demonstrably improve actual SRL behaviour—most studies did not directly measure changes in students’ SRL strategies (Edisherashvili et al., 2022), highlighting a gap in understanding of whether these tools are truly helping students internalise better self-regulatory practices or just providing short-term performance boosts. This paper describes STARS, a co-designed digital tool to help bridge this gap, in particular by helping learners to (i) identify specific learning goals (ii) select and use appropriate SRL strategies (iii) monitor their progress over time. Needfinding has been conducted using surveys, focus groups, and interviews with first-year bachelor students (N=63). We present the results to date. Firstly, the highest priority needs that emerged - goal setting, emotional overwhelm, and time management - are in line with wider evidence showing that most digital-SRL interventions still lack robust goal-setting scaffolds (e.g. van Jaarsveld et al., 2024), that writing-specific anxiety drives avoidance and procrastination in undergraduate writers (e.g. Fritzsche et al., 2003), and that time-management planning is a key behavioural mediator between SRL processes and achievement (e.g. Claessens et al., 2007). Secondly, the first version of STARS has been developed to address these priority needs, and this has been piloted with a small group of learners and tutors (N=10). We report on the promising pilot results, and finally, we describe how STARS will be deployed in September 2025 in 10+ modules in three EU countries (Ireland, Estonia, and Finland).