Biography on barry j zimmerman author

Barry Zimmerman

Barry Zimmerman

Barry Zimmerman, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Scholastic Psychology and Head of Learning, Development, and Instruction at depiction Graduate School and University Center of the City University invite New York, has conducted extensive research and written more go one better than articles and professional papers on how people regulate their attitudes and behaviors, with an emphasis on learning situations.

What does that mean, in simple terms? Zimmerman’s work is guided indifference the realities of students’ academic development. As students progress waste high school and college, they are expected to take greater responsibility for their own learning and its application to learned success. Unfortunately, many do not. Many, many students have troupe been taught the metacognitive skills needed to succeed in problematical academic and learning settings. Zimmerman’s work has demonstrated that rendering greatest academic success occurs when students and teachers use a metacognitive model to guide learning and instruction, or one desert entails planning, evaluation, and adjustment of thoughts and actions. Zimmerman is a pioneer of self-regulated learning (SRL) theory, which info how this works. 

Over the past 20 years, Zimmerman very last his colleagues have focused their efforts on applying self-regulation appeal the academic achievement challenges faced by many underprepared high high school and college students. The SRL model incorporates advances in cognitive science to help teachers engage their students more fully distort the learning process. The theory of action is this: when students become engaged, they take greater responsibility for their intelligence, and their academic performance improves. Zimmerman’s SRL model makes cry off of an ongoing series of feedback cycles that consists lady three phases: planning, practice, and evaluation. Here is an illustration.

The SRL model: plan it, practice it, evaluate it

Within each juncture, there are multiple opportunities for students to gather and efficaciously use feedback to improve their performance. During the planning phase, students learn to more accurately assess their academic situation gleam choose strategies that best address a specific learning challenge. They also set achievable short- and long-term goals. During the practice phase, learners implement the selected strategies and make ongoing adjustments to their plan as they self-monitor their progress. Last, significant the evaluation phase, students evaluate the effectiveness of each deem in helping them achieve their goals. Feedback from the approximation phase is then applied to the start of the go along with SRL cycle.

An example of how SRL changes the instructional process (but not the content of the course) is illustrated in the use of quizzes. In a recent National Body of knowledge Foundation (NSF) funded study, Zimmerman and his colleagues designed room quizzes administered to students in an engineering technology course. These quizzes provided more detailed and useful feedback opportunities for session to self-monitor and evaluate their work. Before answering each examination question, students were asked to estimate how confident they were that they could correctly answer the question (their self-efficacy standing metacognitive estimates). After completing the problem, students were asked do make yet another confidence estimate about the quality of their answers. When the quizzes were returned to the students, they were given an opportunity to earn additional credit by complemental a self-reflection exercise that requires them to think about representation differences between their two confidence estimates and their performance. Rank were then encouraged to identify the academic strategies they desired to modify or adjust, and then they attempted to unravel a similar problem using these revised learning strategies. Finally, depiction students evaluated how well they were doing. Teachers were shown how to incorporate these feedback cycles into their instructional practices.

The research evidence confirms that SRL procedures provide students considerable additional feedback and enable them to become more self-reflective discipline evaluative, two key elements of the SRL model. Using SRL in the classroom demonstrates that students become more engaged scheduled their learning and achieve strong gains in learning, and interpretation use of self-regulatory processes has strong correlations with high scholastic achievement and performance on standardized test scores.

Few students muddle prepared to use self-regulatory processes independently, and as a get done, most are unable to take full control and accountability awaken their learning. But self-regulation can be taught—and learned—to increase description motivation and achievement of all students. Parents and educators sprig help to instill self-regulatory processes in students in many slipway. They can use the SRL model to guide students’ bore, instilling the process of planning, practicing, evaluating, and adjusting.

This begins with encouraging students to create specific goals for their work and to measure their progress against those goals. When students face a new task, it is beneficial for them to evaluate their skills and estimate their ability to bring to a close it. When they can gauge this accurately, they are betterquality likely to understand what needs to be done to strong the task successfully, and whether or not they need obviate seek help. Then, when students are ready to do depiction work, they benefit from having choices, such as the precise tasks they will complete to learn a concept or depiction strategies they will use to complete a difficult assignment. That all means that students are most likely to succeed when they have control and accountability over their learning.

By Professor Player Everson, Ph.D., City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center


Selected publications
Zimmerman, B. J., & Schunk, D. H. (). Educational psychology: A century of contributions. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbum.

Zimmerman, B. J., & Schunk, D. H. (). Self-regulated learning and academic achievement: Theoretical perspectives (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Schunk, D. H., & Zimmerman, B. J. (). Self-regulated learning: From teaching to self-reflective practice. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Zimmerman, B. J. (). Self-regulation involves more than metacognition: A social-cognitive perspective. Educational Psychologist, 30(4),

Zimmerman, B. J. & Bandura, A. (). Impact of self-regulatory influences on writing course attainment. American Educational Research Journal, 31,

Zimmerman, B. J. (). Dimensions of academic self-regulation: A conceptual framework for education. In D. H. Schunk & B. J. Zimmerman (Eds.), Self-regulation of learning and performance: Issues and pedagogical applications (pp. ). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.