Procedural advice on self-assessment and task selection in learner-controlled education

Learner-controlled education gives learners control over their learning pathways. They assess their own performance and select a task out of a large set of learning tasks, accommodating their own learning needs. However, novice learners often do not possess the self-assessment and task-selection skills necessary for determining an appropriate path. Especially if they are novices in the learning domain too, it is even harder to set an appropriate path. They will be overloaded by both the unfamiliar learning environment and the unfamiliar domain. Moreover, they will not know what performance standards are relevant for performance assessment, and what task characteristics to take into account for task selection. Consequently, they probably will neither gain a great deal of knowledge nor improve domain-specific skills. This study tested whether a procedural advisory model providing self-assessment and task-selection advice, helps learners in learner-controlled education to determine an appropriate learning pathway. The self-assessment advice provides a scoring rubric for assessing performance. The task-selection advice provides a rule which is based on the learner’s self-assessment and mental effort and the task aspects of the prior task. These learners will be better able to determine their own learning pathway, in turn enhancing learning performance. The model is expected to benefit the learners’ development of self-assessment and task-selection skills, and, consequently, positively affect acquisition of the learners’ domain-specific skills. The preliminary results are in line with these expectations.