What does Social Cognitive Theory say about Improving Self-Regulation?

In other occasions where we talked about improving students' self-regulation for academic success, we first had to take a position about to what extent we think self-regulation is a trait, or skill, or both. Then we talked about fostering self-regulation in a stand-alone program (e.g., a separate course) or integrating self-regulation into each subject matter learning. It is so promising if I believe there is a certain level of transferable self-regulation strategies across subject domain because in this way, we can expect a success in one scenario can lead to more successes in other scenarios. Self-regulation then can be a "trainable" skill and may eventually become a trait of a person.

Having read the literature of social cognitive theory and had discussion in Dr. Glassman's class, I think I need to be more careful and accurate about the arguments of the general term: self-regulation. Social cognitive theory explains self-regulation based on its assumption of human agency and its role in the triadic relationship between personal factors, environmental factors and behaviors.The core concept that is missed by me in the past is the exercise of control and personal agency. Not all the intentional regulatory behaviors are adaptive or good for building up self-efficacy. For example, cheating is a kind of regulatory behavior which is highly linked with performance-oriented classroom structure (see Dr. Eric Anderman's work). In the view of  social cognitive theory, this type of regulatory behaviors won't help build up self-efficacy of the subject domain. While one can be better and better at cheating if one never gets caught, cheating never won't take one closer to mastery goals. People who cheat won't experience the feeling of competent in the subject domain so it is likely that they won't continue the study or do relevant work in this domain when the extrinsic rewards are withdrew.

Another meaningful interaction with the literature is how theory links to the practice.

There are cautions that should be taken as regards the nature and focus of interventions to increase self-efficacy. As is presently the case with self-esteem, there is the danger that self-efficacy may soon come in a kit. Bandura's (1986) emphasis that enactive attainment is the most influential source of self-efficacy information has important implications for the self-enhancement model of academic achievement which contends that, to increase achievement, educational efforts should focus on raising students' feelings of self-worth or of competence. This is usually accomplished through programs that emphasize building self-beliefs through verbal persuasion methods. Social cognitive theory shifts that emphasis and focuses on a joint effort to raise competence and confidence primarily through successful experience with the performance at hand, through authentic mastery experiences. Interventions should be designed accordingly (Pajares, 1996, 569)

I agree that fostering self-regulation should aim at fostering self-regulation for efficacious experience. Goal setting, planning, time management, reading and writing strategies, and the like should be modeled not for the sake of themselves (e.g., "Top five tips for college students") but for giving students' successful experience. When we model effective self-regulation, we should model effective self-regulation that can help students to see the intrinsic value of the tasks/subject rather than the technique itself. That is what we touched on during the class discussion: fostering self-efficacy or self-regulation is through process (providing experience for students) instead of product (equipping skills to students).

I like how Dr.Glassman in the class pointed out that "deep" strategy use or more efforts only when one is intrinsically motivated. This goes back to a quote from Zimmerman (2000)  I like to cite in the past with better understanding this time:

"self-regulatory skills are of little value if a person cannot motivate themselves to use them" (p. 17)

Now I have a bunch of new questions that I hope we can talk about in the future class:

• How do we as teachers balance between pre-defined syllabus and self-set goals?
• If one is novice in the subject domain, how can we help students to self-set goals?
• Why do some students like "well-structured" course? This is common in online courses (my interest). Students are like "I need to know specifically what to do."

References
Pajares, F. (1996). Self-efficacy beliefs in academic settings. Review of educational research, 66(4), 543-578.
Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). Attaining self-regulation: A social cognitive perspective. In Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 13-39). Academic Press.