Helping Students Self-Regulate their Physics Learning

Most research in physics education has focused on making classroom instruction more effective. Yet much of students’ learning occurs outside of class, where they must independently plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning. Theories of self-regulated learning (SRL) have identified a range of effective strategies that support these processes, but relatively little work has examined how they operate in the specific context of undergraduate physics. In this talk, I will discuss recent research examining how students’ use and perceived value of learning strategies differ across disciplines (e.g., biology vs. physics) and modalities (online vs. in-person). I will then describe an intervention that leverages digital “nudges” to help students adopt more productive strategies and self-regulatory behaviors. Finally, I will consider how such approaches might be extended through artificial intelligence to personalize support for students’ independent learning in physics.