Investigating the immediate and sustainable effectiveness of self-regulation strategies instruction on self-regulatory strategies and math problem solving ability

The studies on math education indicates that math education hardly creates the solving problem ability among the students. This led the math education experts to try to find out the etiology of this phenomenon. Following some studies in this regard, they found out that the success on math problem solving ability requires not only the acquisition of the principles of math concepts, but also, the self-regulatory strategies. In this study, we tried to investigate the immediate  and sustainable effectiveness of self-regulation strategies instruction on self-regulatory skills of learners and their performance on  math problem solving. The sample contained 181 third grade  guidance school students (all girls) who were selected by multiple cluster sampling from Tehran educational districts 1, 6 & 19. Then, they were randomly assigned as experimental and control groups. Before instruction, two groups received two pre-test, one was self-regulated learning questionnaire and the other was math problem solving test. Then, experimental group received instruction on self-regulatory strategies for 8 weeks and control group received instruction in the traditional method. Finally, after one month instruction, the two groups (Experimental and control groups) received again two post-tests, one was self-regulated learning questionnaire and the other was math problem solving test. The results showed no significant differences between the two groups in pretest. However, in the post test, there was significant differences between the experimental and control groups on the self-regulatory strategies and math problem solving ability to the benefit of experimental group. So, we could say that self–regulation strategies could be learned and if correctly instructed, it would have a long-lasting effect.