2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Effective self-regulated learning (SRL), the process through which learners take active control of their learning by planning, monitoring, and reflecting on their progress toward academic goals, is a critical skill for both academic achievement and lifelong professional success in engineering. Engineers must continuously adapt to emerging technologies, tools, and methodologies, yet many undergraduates progress through engineering programs without mastering the skills needed to learn effectively and independently. Research consistently shows that engineering students frequently rely on inefficient strategies such as rereading, highlighting, and rote memorization, approaches that undermine conceptual understanding, long-term retention, and the transferability of knowledge.
Although the importance of SRL for student success is widely recognized, there remains limited understanding of effective ways to help students strengthen this skill. Prior studies indicate that SRL interventions are most impactful when situated within the learning context; Prior studies have indicated that SRL interventions were most effective when situated in a context, and when fostering a high amount of student activities and metacognitive awareness. Such “embedded” instruction allows students to bring the application of metacognitive strategies in line with task demands by deciding which activity needs to be performed when in the context of a specific task. However, how instructors can effectively support students in enacting SRL within engineering courses is still underexplored. Common pedagogies in engineering education, such as project-based learning, formative assessment design, exam wrappers, and flipped classrooms, implicitly encourage students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning. Yet research suggests that such indirect activation, while valuable, is often insufficient to cultivate metacognitive awareness or promote the transfer of SRL skills to new contexts. Recent work highlights the importance of explicit SRL instruction, enabling students to develop the cognitive and metacognitive skills required to intentionally and effectively integrate evidence-based learning strategies into their learning processes.
In this paper, we investigate the implementation and outcomes of course-integrated SRL intervention in two foundational mechanical engineering course series: Course #1– Statics and Introduction to Dynamics and Course #2 – Solid Mechanics I. This course-integrated SRL Intervention leverages the synergy between explicit instruction and indirect promotion of SRL in engineering courses. The explicit component teaches evidence-based learning strategies, such as active recall, concept mapping, elaboration, self-explanation, and spaced or interleaved practice, as well as growth mindset and metacognitive regulation. The indirect component embeds these strategies within authentic engineering coursework through evidence-based learning strategies assignments, projects, and post-exam reflections, prompting students to plan, monitor, and regulate their learning as part of disciplinary problem-solving. A mixed-methods research method combining quantitative and qualitative data was used to examine the feasibility, student engagement, perceptions, and preliminary impact of integrating SRL instruction directly into core engineering courses, with particular attention to changes in students’ motivation, use of effective learning strategies, and course performance. The study also identified key design characteristics, including task relevance, scaffolding, feedback, and incentive structure, that most strongly influenced participation, offering valuable guidance for refining engagement strategies and improving scalability.