How This Award-Winning Tool Helps Students Master Digital Self-Regulation
- Kevin Kuckkan, M.Ed.
- Jan 24, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 19
After 10 years of being a math teacher, I know we teachers can immediately identify specific students who may have difficulty staying on task, maintaining focus, remaining seated, or just paying attention.
The task of gaining student attention and providing opportunities to practice self-regulation during their learning occurs daily in practically every classroom across the country.
In this article, we'll explain how vital self-regulation skills are for students to maintain focus and block out potential distractions. We'll then reveal one powerful tool that's shifting the war on student attention back to teachers.
First: Why Is Self-Regulation Important?
Much like students who struggle with self-regulation in a traditional classroom setting, a student’s inability to find balance in their digital media consumption is often a matter of self-regulation. It shouldn’t be too surprising that students who succeed in a traditional paper/pencil learning environment are able to consistently demonstrate metacognitive self-regulation strategies during digital learning (Ahtnonysamy et al., 2020), successfully transferring vital self-regulation skills from one learning modality to another.
Predictably, students who lack self-regulation in traditional learning environments also struggle to self-regulate in digitally-oriented learning environment (Lillian et al., 2021) with studies indicating that for some students, the digital environment increases the likelihood that self-regulation will be difficult to achieve.
The take-away? If a student struggles to self-regulate in a traditional learning environment, those same self-regulation difficulties are often exacerbated once they’re provided access to Chromebooks, iPads, Macs or other devices.
The Growing Challenges in the Digital Age
Nationwide, student behavior in K12 digital learning environments is a growing concern. As digital learning resources continue to evolve, so do the challenges schools face in improving the effectiveness of educational technology initiatives. Today’s dynamic internet warrants technologies that are able to recognize content, understand contextual nuance, discern keyword ambiguity, and decipher newly created inventive spellings students frequently use to evade filter detection.
It's no one’s fault that schools sometimes struggle to prevent students from accessing distracting content on school devices. School district IT teams do the best they can with the resources they have. Instead, it is simply a matter of the increasingly dynamic internet surpassing the legacy filtering technology’s ability to manage it consistently and prevent students from accessing distracting content unabated.
Since 2016, we at The Deledao Team have reported how digital distractions are getting in the way of enhancing educational technology initiatives in schools. Yet traditional web-filters repeatedly choose to ignore this worsening issue.
That's why we finally made our own classroom management software.
How ActiveInstruct™ is Proven to Help Students Develop Digital Self-Regulation Skills
ActiveInstruct™ utilizes patented InstantAI™ technology to help teachers to create distraction-free digital classrooms. Every piece of content, video, and page on the nearly two billion available websites are analyzed the very instant a student attempts to access it, not dependent upon blocklists or search keyword recognition.
And the results are astounding
A study of over 1000 students from school districts across the U.S. showed that 42% of students completely stopped their attempts to access distracting content after just four weeks of using ActiveInstruct™.
The significant drop in attempts to access distracting content is an indicator that students who previously engaged in chronic media multitasking during class are, in fact, changing their behavior and demonstrating the development of digital self-regulation skills.
Deledao improves the effectiveness of digital learning by ensuring that school devices remain used by students as intended – for learning!
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