Zimmerman

CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 22, 73–101 (1997)
ARTICLE NO. EP970919
RESEARCH FOR THE FUTURE
Becoming a Self-Regulated Writer:

A Social Cognitive Perspective
BARRY J. ZIMMERMAN
Department of Educational Psychology, Graduate School and University
Center, City University of New York
AND
RAFAEL RISEMBERG
Department of Communication Sciences, Kean College of New Jersey
Becoming an adept writer involves more than knowledge of vocabulary and grammar,
it depends on high levels of personal regulation because writing activities are usually
self-planned, self-initiated, and self-sustained. We present a social cognitive model
of writing composed of three fundamental forms of self-regulation: environmental,
behavioral, and covert or personal. Each of these triadic forms of self-regulation interact
reciprocally via a cyclic feedback loop through which writers self-monitor and self-
react to feedback about the effectiveness of specific self-regulatory techniques or pro-
cesses. Well known writers’ personal descriptions of ten major self-regulatory tech-
niques are recounted, and empirical studies demonstrating the effectiveness of these
self-regulatory techniques are discussed. We conclude that writing self-regulation is a
complex system of interdependent processes that are closely linked to an underlying
sense of self-efficacy, and we discuss implications of the proposed model of self-
regulatory processes and self-beliefs for guiding future research and developing innova-
tive writing instruction. q 1997 Academic Press
During this era of cyberspace and microcomputers, skill in developing

ideas and expressing them in written form has become essential to success
in not only school but also in the personal and professional world beyond.
Most students recognize that in order to become a proficient writer, they must
acquire knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, however, they are far less
aware of their need for high levels of self-regulation (Bereiter & Scardamelia,
1987; Wason, 1980). This need stems from the fact that writing activities
are usually self-planned, self-initiated, and self-sustained. Writers typically
Research for this article was supported in part by grants from the National Heart, Lung, Blood
Institute of the National Institutes of Health (RO1-HL51521-01). Address correspondence and
reprint requests to Barry J. Zimmerman, Graduate School and University Center of City Univer-
sity of New York, 33 West 42nd St., New York, NY 10036-8099.
73
0361-476X/97 $25.00
Copyright q 1997 by Academic Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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74 ZIMMERMAN AND RISEMBERG
perform alone, often over long periods with frequent stretches of meager
results, and repeatedly revise output to fulfill personal standards of quality.
These demanding personal requirements have led writers throughout history to
develop varied techniques of ‘‘self-discipline’’ to enhance their effectiveness
(Barzon, 1964; Gould, 1980; Plimpton, 1965; Wallace & Pear, 1977). Because
relatively few American students develop high levels of writing skill (DeWitt,
1992), the processes governing the development of writing proficiency are a
matter of considerable national import.
In this article, we review prominent theories of writing regarding issues of
self-regulation and present a social cognitive model of writing self-regulation
to explain major processes that underlie the effectiveness of these techniques.
Third, we recount some fascinating personal descriptions of self-regulatory
techniques by well known writers. Fourth, we describe empirical studies that
demonstrate the key role that self-regulatory processes play in becoming a
proficient writer, and finally, we draw conclusions and consider implications
of this account for future research and development.
THEORIES OF WRITING AND ITS SELF-REGULATION
An early model of writing was proposed by Rohman (1965). This formula-
tion conceptualized writing in terms of three successive stages: (a) prewriting
which involved planning, (b) writing which involved composing a draft, and
(c) rewriting which involved editing and revising. This approach had the
advantage of decomposing writing into subprocesses that could be taught and
self-regulated separately but had the disadvantage of assuming that writing
developed according to a linear sequence of stages. Observations of the pro-
cess of writing using think-aloud protocols revealed that writers seldom pro-
ceeded sequentially—preferring instead to write recursively with planning
and revision recurring at frequent intervals (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1983).
These results revealed that writing is more than a mental act, it is a behavioral
event that creates a textual product with dynamic properties of its own.
These interactive features of writing were captured more fully in an infor-
mation processing model by Flower and Hayes (1980). They conceptualized
writing in terms of three major components: the writer’s task environment, the
writer’s long term memory, and the writing process. The writer’s environment
involves the rhetorical problem, written text as it evolves, writing tools, and
external sources of information used during writing, such as a textbook.
Writers’ long-term memory involves their knowledge of the literary topic,
the audience, and their own plans. The process of writing is dissected into
three primary components similar to Rohman’s stages: planning the text,
translating ideas into text, and reviewing the literary draft as it is written.
Planning involves three cognitive subcomponents: generating information that
might be included in the composition, setting goals for the composition, and
organizing information that is retrieved from memory. Translating is the
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A SELF-REGULATORY PERSPECTIVE 75
process of converting ideas into textual output, and reviewing involves two
subcomponents: evaluating and revising text as it is translated. Executive
control over the recursive sequencing of these writing processes was vested
in a cognitive monitor. This complex information processing formulation was
designed to explain emergent and self-reactive properties of writing as well
as preplanned ones, such as redefinitions of initial writing goals as the text
evolves.
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) developed a similar cognitive model of
writing to explain simple knowledge-telling by novice writers as well as
knowledge transformations by expert writers. Two separate sources of knowl-
edge are assumed to affect writers interactively: content and discourse compo-
nents. Writing is decomposed into four main processes: (a) a mental represen-
tation of the task, (b) problem analysis and goal setting, (c) problem translation
between discourse and content components, and (d) resultant knowledge-
telling. Expert writers transform imperfect results of initial knowledge-telling
by recycling them for additional analyses (b) and translations (c). Bereiter
and Scardamalia treated the act of writing as a recursive problem solving
process that helped expert writers think more effectively about a topic. They
discussed two primary classes of strategies that improved writing: rhetorical
and self-regulatory. Rhetorical strategies refer to methods for developing the
plot or sequence of a written passage, such as starting at the end and using
flashback techniques. Self-regulatory strategies refer to ways of managing
one’s own cognitive behavior during writing, such as checking pronouns
for referential suitability. Like Hayes and Flower, Bereiter and Scardamalia
describe self-regulatory strategies as mental subroutines for enhancing writing
performance; however, they suggest that these strategies also contribute to
the development of one’s cognitive system by enabling the personal discovery
of new linguistic rules. Thus, cognitive self-regulatory strategies are viewed
as essential for explaining how writers can acquire greater skill from their
own writing efforts.
The latter two models have provided fruitful accounts of cognitive inter-
active aspects of writing, spawning important investigations of expert–novice
differences in key writing processes, such as planning, translating, reviewing,
and monitoring. For example, compared to experts, novices seldom set writing
goals, usually create text in order of recall regardless of the audience, seldom
monitor their output in relation to writing goals, and seldom revise text at an
organizational level, (e.g., Flower, 1979; Flower & Hayes, 1981; Flower &
Hayes, 1984; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1983). Although the task environment
is a component in Flower and Hayes’ (1980) model and self-regulatory strate-
gies are discussed as an important feature of writing by Bereiter and Scarda-
malia (1987), both of these models focus on the role of cognitive processes
in students’ writing competence.
Explanations for writing performance and its self-regulated development
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need to include the role of social, motivational, and behavioral processes as

well as cognitive ones. Writing is more than a literary expression of cognitive
skill: It is a social cognitive process wherein writers must be aware of readers’
expectations and must be willing to devote the personal time and effort
necessary to revise text drafts until they communicate effectively. Adverse
writing environments, poor writing behavioral practices, low perceptions of
self-efficacy or literary benefits can undermine engagement in writing activi-
ties and subsequent development of literary skill. Professional writers take
special pains to create favorable social and physical environments in which
to write. Furthermore, they use a variety of behavioral as well as cognitive
methods to garner and sustain affective experiences and motivation. For exam-
ple, while writing his epic novel Roots, the African-American writer Alex
Haley (1976) voluntarily confined himself in the hull of a ship to experience
first hand and capture in print the feelings of enchained slaves. This example
dramatically shows how cognitive processes interact triadically with behav-
ioral, environmental, and affective processes during writing, and how optimal
levels of literary skill require multifaceted self-regulation. If skillful writers
like Haley can enhance their writing by self-regulating the full range of triadic
influences, we suggest that novice writers can also benefit from instructional
methods that emphasize triadic forms of self-regulation, such as behavioral
self-monitoring of textual output and self-structuring of writing opportunities
and settings. Motivational processes such as perceptions of self-efficacy and
positive self-reactions during learning are as essential to setting effective
writing goals and sustained achievement as cognitive measures of writing
competence (Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994).
A SOCIAL COGNITIVE VIEW OF WRITER SELF-REGULATION
Most self-regulatory techniques used by writers appear to have been devel-
oped informally as they struggled with their craft or acquired imitatively from
successful models. These techniques for enhancing writing are very similar
to self-regulatory processes that have been investigated in other content areas
(Zimmerman & Martinez-Pons, 1986; Pintrich & De Groot, 1990). The pro-
posed account of writing will draw heavily on prior theorizing regarding
general academic self-regulation by Zimmerman (1989) and Schunk and Zim-
merman (in press).
Self-regulation of writing refers to self-initiated thoughts, feelings, and
actions that writers use to attain various literary goals, including improving
their writing skills as well as enhancing the quality of the text they create
(Schunk & Zimmerman, in press). These processes can be grouped into three
major categories of self-regulatory influence: environmental processes, behav-
ioral processes, and personal processes. Environmental processes refer to
writers’ self-regulation of the physical or social setting in which they write,
behavioral processes pertain to writers’ self-regulation of overt motoric activi-
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ties associated with writing, and personal processes involve writers’ self-
regulation of cognitive beliefs and affective states associated with writing.
This triadic system of self-regulatory processes is closely linked to an underly-
ing sense of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy for writing refers to perceptions of
one’s own capabilities to plan and implement actions necessary to attain
designated levels of writing on specific tasks (Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994;
Pajares & Johnson, 1994), such as one’s certainty about getting an A on a
book report. Social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986) is especially well suited
for explaining the self-regulation of writing because it emphasizes (a) recipro-
cal relations between triadic sources of self-regulatory influence and (b) the
role of self-efficacy beliefs on personal motivation and achievement.
We suggest that personal, behavioral, and environmental self-regulatory
processes interact reciprocally during writing via an enactive feedback loop.
This loop is composed of a cyclic process in which writers monitor the
effectiveness of their self-regulatory strategies and self-react to the ensuing
feedback in a number of ways, such as continuing the strategy if it is successful
and modifying or changing it when it is not. ‘‘Process’’ approaches to writing
especially emphasize the important role of this self-regulatory feedback loop.
For example, Murray (1990) describes the process of writing as inherently
recursive rather than neat or linear. ‘‘We start drafting, not knowing what we
are going to say and find we are collecting material, and the order in which
it begins to arrange itself on the page makes our focus clear’’ (pp. 7–8).
Corresponding to these triadic influences are three classes of writer self-
regulation: covert (personal), behavioral, and environmental (see Fig. 1). Co-
vert self-regulation refers to the adaptive use of cognitive or affective strate-
gies, such as when writers set aside a 3-h time period to write each day or
lower their self-evaluative standards to reduce anxiety. These writing strate-
gies are continued or changed depending on feedback regarding subsequent
personal productivity. Behavioral self-regulation pertains to the adaptive use
of a motoric performance strategy, such as when a writer keeps a record of
the number of pages that were written during a particular day. This strategy
is continued or modified depending on feedback showing its differential effec-
tiveness. Environmental self-regulation involves a writer’s adaptive use of an
context-related strategy, such as closing the window of the room to screen
out distracting sounds. This strategy is continued or adjusted on the basis of
the number of intrusive sounds when the window is closed compared to when
it is open.
From this triadic perspective, the relative importance of each form of self-
regulation during writing is assumed to vary on the basis of (a) personal efforts
to self-regulate, (b) outcomes of behavioral performance, and (c) changes in
environmental context. Consider the example of a high school girl who is
writing an essay on the impact of televised violence on children’s aggression.
She might improve her writing effectiveness by setting daily output goals
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FIG. 1. Reciprocal determinants of self-regulated functioning. Adapted from ‘‘A social cogni-
tive view of self-regulated academic learning’’ by B. J. Zimmerman, Journal of Educational
Psychology, 81, 330. Copyright by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted by permis-
sion.
and keeping a diary of pages written each day (influences a and b) or by

asking another student to give her feedback on her essay draft (influence c).
Optimally self-regulated writers would attempt to use all three forms of self-
regulation in conjunction with each other. To do so, such writers must be
sensitive to the impact of variations in their environmental, behavioral, and
internal states if they are to remain fully self-regulatory. In addition to such
self-monitoring, a writer’s self-regulatory expertise depends on his or her
general learning and development. With increasing age and experience, writ-
ers are assumed to be better able to self-regulate essential literary processes.
Strategic feedback loops do more than enable writers to be sensitive and
adaptive to their output during the course of writing; the resultant feedback
alters writers’ conceptions of their self-efficacy. In general, when strategic
feedback indicates improved or superior textual output, writers’ self-efficacy
is enhanced, and when such feedback is unfavorable, their self-efficacy is
diminished. It is also hypothesized that writers will continue to self-regulate
when a self-regulative strategy increases their perceptions of self-efficacy.
Thus, writers’ sense of self-efficacy is predictive of not only their self-regula-
tory processes but also their intrinsic motivation to write and their eventual
literary outcomes (Schunk & Zimmerman, in press; Zimmerman & Bandura,
1994; Zimmerman, 1985).
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TABLE 1
TRIADIC SELF-REGULATORY PROCESSES in WRITING
Environmental processes
1. Environmental structuring involves selecting, organizing, and creating effective writing
settings, such as a sound proof room.
2. Self-selected models, tutors, or books refer to social sources of writing knowledge and
skill, such as learning to use metaphors by imitating a gifted novelist.
Behavioral processes
3. Self-monitoring pertains to overt tracking of one’s own performance, such as keeping a
record of pages of written text.
4. Self-consequences refer to making a reward or punishment contingent on one’s writing
accomplishment, such as going out for dinner after completing the first draft of a report.
5. Self-verbalization pertains to personal articulation to enhance the process of writing,
such as saying dialogue for a play aloud as one composes.
Personal (Covert) processes

6. Time planning and management pertain to estimating and budgeting time for writing,
such as reserving a three hour block of time to write early each morning.
7. Goal setting involves specifying the intended outcomes of writing efforts, such as
finishing a chapter of a novel within 2 weeks.
8. Self-evaluative standards involve setting and adhering to specific standards of personal
satisfaction regarding one’s writing, such as criteria for judging the quality of a concluding
paragraph.
9. Cognitive strategies refer to rule governed methods for organizing, producing, and
transforming written text, such as formulating an outline to guide writing or revising a first
draft of paper by varying the structure of adjacent sentences.
10. Mental imagery refers to recalling or creating a vivid mental image of a setting,
activity, or character to facilitate written descriptions of it, such as when tennis instructors
imagine a service motion as they attempt to describe it in written form.
Ten common forms of triadic self-regulation reported by well-known writ-

ers have been identified and studied in descriptive or experimental research.
Formal definitions and examples of each type of self-regulation are given in
Table 1. Below we will describe the use of these 10 forms of self-regulation
by well known authors and will discuss research regarding each form’s effec-
tiveness.
Self-efficacy beliefs are expected to be linked reciprocally to students’ use
of these self-regulatory methods in two important ways. First, novice writers
who learn to use these techniques will increase their perceptions of self-
efficacy to write effectively, and second, writers’ self-efficacy beliefs will
predict their levels of self-regulation and ultimately their literary achievement.
For example, showing students how to set specific short-term writing goals
for themselves will strengthen their perceptions of self-efficacy because their
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literary progress is more evident (Schunk, 1990). Reciprocally, students’ level

of self-efficacy will predict how ambitiously they set grade goals for a course
in writing (Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994). Students who have a strong belief
in their writing capabilities will not only set higher goals for themselves but
will persist longer on writing tasks in the face of difficulties and achieve more
than their less self-efficacious counterparts (Bouffard-Bouchard, Parent, &
Larivee, 1991; Collins, 1982; Schunk, 1984; Zimmerman, 1995). Similar
predictions can be made for the reciprocal or recursive relation between self-
efficacy and the nine other personal, environmental and behavioral classes of
self-regulatory strategies for writing.
SELF-REGULATION BY WELL-KNOWN WRITERS
When writers’ sense of personal mission or livelihood depends on their
ability to generate creative, informative, or scientifically important text within
a limited time period, they can seldom afford to wait for the muse of inspira-
tion. These conditions have led writers throughout history to develop rich
repertoires of self-regulatory techniques to assist them to write more effec-
tively.
The first triadic category, environmental processes, refers to writers’ self-
regulation of the physical or social setting in which they write. Many authors
use a form of environmental structuring to select, organize, or create an
effective writing settings. For example, the French poet and novelist Cendrars
described his need to write in a small enclosed place; whereas the American
novelist Norman Mailer preferred a long room with a view (Plimpton, 1964).
The French novelist Marcel Proust was distracted by outside sounds and
preferred to write in a cork-lined room he had constructed to screen them
out, but the British poet Shelley often wrote bare-headed outdoors (Barzon,
1964). Writers have been also fussy about the literary tools they use. For
example, the British poet and story teller Rudyard Kipling would write only
with the blackest ink, and the American poet Robert Frost would compose
only on a writing board and would improvise for it while walking by using
the bottom of his shoe if he was struck by an idea (Barzon, 1964). The
German playwright and philosopher Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk
because he liked the fruity odor, and he often wrote with his feet immersed
in cold water to stimulate thought. In contrast, the British poet and dramatist
Ben Jonson believed he wrote best when stimulated by the pungent odor of
an orange peel, warmed by a lot of tea and a purring cat (Barzon, 1964).
Even the clothing worn by writers drew their attention. The prolific French
novelist Honore De Balzac wrote in monkish garb, but his countryman Victor
Hugo wrote in the nude (Barzon, 1964). Hugo had so much trouble resisting
the temptations of tavern life while writing, he resorted to giving all his
clothing to his valet with strict orders not to return until an appointed time.
Some writers were quite scientific about their use of self-regulatory tech-
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niques for writing. Benjamin Franklin described his use of a social form of
environmental self-regulation, self-selected modeling, to improve his style of
writing (Lemay & Zall, 1986). First, he would make notes on a passage
written by an exemplary literary model and then would attempt to rewrite
the passage from his notes. Finally, he would compare the two versions to
see where he could still improve his writing technique. This self-selected and
self-initiated modeling method for improving Franklin’s writing worked well:
Although he received little formal training as a writer, his Poor Richard’s
Almanac was among the most widely read books of its time.
We turn next to the second of these triadic categories, behavioral forms of
self-regulation, which involve specific overt motoric activities that writers
use to manage their craft more successfully. Many authors gave considerable
attention to self-monitoring or self-recording of various forms of written
output, such as page or word production. For example, the British novelist
Anthony Trollope (1946) wrote more than 50 novels and was perhaps the
greatest record keeper in literature. When he began each new book, he would
organize his personal diary into weeks, and he would set specific writing
goals for each period. Faithfully recording the pages he completed each day,
Trollop averaged 40 pages per week, never dropping below 20 pages and
topping out at 112 pages for his most productive week. Similar forms of self-
recording were used by many writers, ranging from novelists like Ernest
Hemingway and Irving Wallace to psychologists, such as B. F. Skinner. Self-
monitoring procedures are used to increase writers’ self-awareness of their
progress.
Another behavioral self-regulatory technique involves use of tangible self-
consequences, which refers to rewarding literary accomplishment according
to a planned personal contingency. Hemingway used his records of daily
written output to reward himself (Plimpton, 1965). If he could get more than
a day ahead of his planned writing goals, he felt justified in taking a day off
for pleasurable activities. For example, while living in Cuba, he made his
fishing trips in the Gulf Stream contingent on extraordinary levels of writing.
A final behavioral technique commonly used by many writers to generate
and revise text is self-verbalization. Letter writers commonly say to them-
selves what they are about to write perhaps because speaking is 35 to 75%
faster than writing (Gould, 1980). Poets, playwrights, and novelists commonly
read drafts of dialogue aloud to appraise its tone, realism and rhythmic proper-
ties, often changing the inflection of their voices when more than one character
or a different emotion is involved (Murray, 1990). In this way, self-verbaliza-
tion functions as an additional source of behavioral feedback about the quality
and appropriateness of written text.
The last triadic category of self-regulation, personal techniques, refers to
covert cognitive and affective processes that writers use to increase their
effectiveness. One of the most important personal methods to enhance writing
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is time planning and management. Many novelists carefully organize their

day by writing early in the morning and relegating the afternoon for other
activities. For example, Goethe recommended, ‘‘Use the day before the day.
Early morning hours have gold in their mouth’’ (Murray, 1990, p. 16).
Through careful time planning, writers are able to sustain prodigious daily
efforts: De Balzac wrote 6 to 12 h per day, Joseph Conrad wrote 8 h, and
Hemingway wrote 6 h per day (Wallace & Pear, 1977). When writing is
scheduled carefully and efforts are made to prevent other activities from
intruding into that schedule, there are major benefits to be gained.
A closely associated cognitive technique for self-regulating writing activi-
ties has already been described, goal setting, which involves setting specific
word or page goals for daily or weekly output. As we noted earlier, before
Trollop (1946) began writing, he set specific writing goals to attain each
week. He believed goals focused his daily activities and functioned as implicit
standards for self-evaluation. Irving Wallace described the impact of specific
goals in the following way, ‘‘I wanted to create disciples for myself, ones
that were guilt making when ignored. A chart on the wall served as such a
disciple, its figures scolding me or encouraging me’’ (Wallace & Pear, 1971,
p. 68).
Some writers felt the need to set or modify their standards of personal
satisfaction for self-evaluating their writing quality, such as creating an open-
ing sentence that meets the criteria of (a) provocative, (b) overarching, and
(c) consequential. High self-evaluative standards can help writers improve
the quality of their prose or poetry, but such standards can also inhibit one’s
word fluency if they become unreasonable. The poet William Stafford (Mur-
ray, 1990) found that excessive self-evaluative standards are a major source
of ‘‘writer’s block,’’ and he developed ways to lower his standards when his
fluency dropped, such as delaying writing quality judgments until after text
is generated.
An especially important cognitive technique for self-regulating writing ac-
tivities is the use of text-specific cognitive strategies for writing. These range
from idea-generation strategies, such as the use of an outline or a figure, to
revision strategies, such as grammatical checking of written drafts for subject–
verb agreement. Irving Wallace prepared extensive notes and outlines before
he began writing. ‘‘On each new novel, I have always written many outlines
for myself, developing scenes, and characters, underlying story problems that
need further thought. I work the novel out in chronological sequence, over
many weeks, in my head and then roughly on paper before beginning it’’
(Wallace, 1971, p. 51–52). Other writing strategies were smaller in scope
but no less important. For example, Hemingway would purposely stop writing
each day in midsentence because he found this strategy enabled him to begin
writing without delay on the following day (Plimpton, 1995).
A final cognitive self-regulatory technique is mental imagery. Many novel-
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ists have learned to imagine a plot, character, or setting in gory, romantic, or

pastoral detail to enhance the vividness of their prose. Several writers also
use imagery of potentially adverse consequences to motivate themselves to
deliver their work on time, such as becoming destitute or losing a supportive
publisher or patron. There are even cases where writers relied on illegal
techniques to enhance their personal imagery, such as the use of hallucino-
genic drugs by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, or engaging in
sado-masochistic conduct by the Marquis de Sade (Barzon, 1964).
Clearly, many writers have devised some clever and unusual methods to
self-regulate their effectiveness. As they developed greater self-regulatory
control over their writing skill, their beliefs in themselves as writers and in
the value of their literary work grew increasingly positive. These changes in
self-conception were vital to their ultimate success. In his book Rejection,
John White (1982) has written movingly about the importance of a strong
sense of efficacy among writers. Many famous writers, such as Gertrude
Stein, had to overcome countless rejections over periods of years before they
were published. White concludes that without resilient belief in themselves
and the value of their work, many writers would not have succeeded. These
self-beliefs also affect the quality of one’s writing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning
editorial writer, Donald Murray (1990, p. 5), concluded, ‘‘We also know that
we write best—just as we play tennis best—if we feel confident. We have
to learn to write with confidence.’’ Thus, it appears that writers’ acquisition
of triadic self-regulatory skill affects their sense of self-efficacy, which in turn
plays a major role in motivating them to sustain their efforts, even in the face
of daunting obstacles.
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON SELF-REGULATORY PROCESSES
We now consider empirical evidence of relationships between these ten
self-regulatory techniques and writing achievement. The first of these tech-
niques, environmental structuring, has received very little research to date
despite its widespread use by well known writers. One of the few studies of
this form of self-regulation was conducted by Marcus (1988). She placed
individual students from the 3rd, 8th, and 11th grades into a room where a
distracting radio and television set already was playing. Subjects then wrote
a brief essay, and their behaviors before, during, and after writing were
recorded. The investigator, after evaluating the quality of the essays written
under these conditions, found that higher essay quality was related to spending
less time watching television and to adjustment of the sound on the radio to
a lower level. Thus, students who restructured the environment to be more
conducive produced better writing.
A second type of environmental self-regulation is social in form, self-
selected tutors, models, and books. Two studies have examined these pro-
cesses during writing, one in a laboratory setting and the other in a field
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setting. Risemberg (1993) assigned college undergraduates the task of writing

a compare-and-contrast expository paper on a particular topic, for which
readings were provided. In addition, students had the option, but were not
required, to access three documents on a personal computer: two model essays
using a compare-and-contrast format and a guideline for writing essays ac-
cording to this organizational format. In order to gain access to these addi-
tional texts, subjects had to keep a computer key depressed, whereupon the
computer recorded the amount of time spent working on these texts. A multi-
ple regression showed that two variables, reading ability and self-selected
text access, uniquely and independently predicted final writing quality. How-
ever, in the second part of this study, students who were taught a content
strategy (graphic organizers) for writing compare-and-contrast essays chose
to access the model texts significantly less often as compared to subjects not
taught the content strategy, and in this phase of the experiment amount of
time spent reading self-selected texts did not uniquely predict writing out-
come. Instead, degree of organization in pre-writing notes, in this case via
the content strategy of graphic organizers, led to the best writing product.
Thus, self-selection of models appears to diminish when students are provided
with direct instruction.
In a field study on self-selection of books, Nelson and Hayes (1988) as-
signed college students an essay topic and then followed them in the library
to ascertain their self-selected book search. They found that freshmen were
more likely to use pre-digested sources, such as encyclopedias, and to gener-
ally make one visit to the library. This made for an efficient, if superficial,
process. In contrast, more advanced students searched for more original
sources, chose sources of higher quality, and made more trips to the library,
presumably leading to a more in-depth self-selected search. In this study
finished essays were not analyzed, and so no relationships between process
and product outcomes could be deduced.
A third behavioral form of self-regulation is overt self-monitoring or self-
recording of writing activities. Three such studies have appeared in the litera-
ture, all of which used a combination of self-monitoring with either goal-
setting (Glynn, 1989; Hull, 1981) or time charts (Boice, 1982) to produce an
increase in number of words written. Van Houten (1979) studied elementary
school students in his intervention. These subjects were engaged in two story
writing periods per day during a baseline period, and they were then given
a treatment of self-recording their writing output and then displaying their
work on a bulletin board. Results showed that students increased the two
target behaviors, which were number of words per minute and percentage of
action words. These outcomes generalized to other story writing periods even
when words per minute and action words were not made the specific target
behaviors.
Rosenberg and Lah (1982) attempted to treat a male graduate student with
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writer’s block, using a behavioral-cognitive treatment that included personal

self-recording of writing behavior in conjunction with therapist reinforcement
of writing behavior. A comparison of baseline and treatment phases showed
that this student expanded on the amount of time spent writing, including on
weekdays, and enhanced the self-reported effectiveness of his writing.
Rumsey and Ballard (1985) investigated the effects of self-recording of
writing behaviors, as well as self-recording of writing output, for students
aged 9–11, some of whom were behaviorally disruptive and initially showed
low levels of on-task writing behavior. Self-recording consisted of counting
daily output of words during a story writing period and then graphing this
output, and also self-recording whether or not they were on task when a
signal sounded. The investigators concluded that disruptive and non-disruptive
subjects increased both written word output and on-task behavior and de-
creased off-task disruptive behavior. When the intervention was removed and
then reintroduced, disruptive students’ levels of output and on-task behavior
did not rise to the same level as it had during the original intervention. At
this point the investigators introduced a goal-setting component to supplement
self-recording, resulting in a return to the previous levels of achievement.
Harris, Graham, Reid, McElroy, and Hamby (1994) set out to compare the
effectiveness of the two types of self-recording used by Rumsey and Ballard
(1985): performance monitoring (recording amount of output) versus attention
monitoring (recording on-task behavior). Subjects were four learning-disabled
students in the fifth and sixth grades. As in the previous study, the task was
story writing. The authors concluded that the two self-recording interventions
succeeded independently in enhancing both writing output and on-task behav-
ior, with neither being evidently more advantageous than the other.
A behavioral form of writing self-regulation that has received very little
empirical attention is self-consequences. Ballard and Glynn (1975) conducted
one such study, albeit in the presence of a second self-regulated learning
strategy, self-monitoring. The investigators sought to increase third grade
students’ writing output by having them count and record the number of
sentences they wrote, along with the number of adjectives and action verbs.
Unexpectedly, the self-recording procedure had little effect on word output
as compared to baseline levels. Then investigators had subjects self-reward
themselves, by taking a minute of free time to enjoy whatever they wished
to do, for every time they wrote either an adjective or action verb. With this
combined self-monitoring and self-consequencing condition, students did, in
fact, write longer stories and did include in their stories more of the targeted
types of words.
A final behavioral form of writing self-regulation involves self-verbaliza-
tion (Meichenbaum & Biemiller, 1990). Roberts and Tharp (1980) videotaped
first grade students as they did a writing assignment and then coded their
spontaneous self-talk as they worked on the task. They found that low- and
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high-IQ students employed the same number of self-instructions, which in

all cases was fairly rare.
Most subsequent studies used self-verbalizations in the form of an interven-
tion, often as self-instructions. Three investigations utilized self-verbalizations
in tasks related to revising text. Daiute and Kruidenier (1985), for example,
inserted a question-prompt element into a word processing program used by
subjects in the seventh and ninth grades. The prompts did not suggest that
subjects revise their work but that they ask themselves questions about text
they had written. Compared to a control group that used no self-verbalizations,
the experimental group revised more often and in a more meaningful way.
Espin and Sindelar (1988) gave normal and learning disabled students texts,
which contained various grammatical and syntactic errors, for subjects to
revise. When subjects were asked to read the texts aloud, both groups of
subjects detected and corrected more errors than when they read the texts
silently. Likewise, Beal, Garrod, and Bonitatibus (1990) presented children
with stories, some of which contained text errors and inconsistencies, and
asked the children to revise the stories. An experimental group of subjects
was taught to self-question the content of the stories, such as by asking
themselves, ‘‘Why are the people in the story doing what they did?’’ Results
showed that these subjects found and revised more text errors compared to
a control group that received no such training.
Englert, Raphael, Anderson, Anthony, and Stevens (1991) utilized self-
instructions, not for the purposes of revision but for appropriate expository
text structure construction. The experimental group of fourth and fifth graders
was taught to use self-talk in conjunction with text structure instruction for
compositions they were working on. This was accomplished by the use of
‘‘think-sheets’’ that students filled out for planning, organizing, and revising.
Results showed that these subjects, compared to a control group receiving
no such instruction, gave more interesting introductions, displayed a greater
awareness of audience, mentioned more targeted text elements, and exhibited
a greater metacognitive awareness of the writing process. In addition, the
experimental group, using self-talk, showed generalization effects toward a
text structure not taught to them during training.
Self-instructions have also been used to promote printing skills of very
young students. Blandford and Lloyd (1987) successfully improved the hand-
writing of elementary school students after training them in the use of a self-
instructional question card. These results persisted weeks later, even when
the card was no longer available to the students. Robin, Armel, and O’Leary
(1975) taught kindergartners to print, either by direct instruction or by self-
instruction. The self-instruction condition did produce statistically superior
writing; however, the investigators reported the self-instruction procedure to
be somewhat cumbersome and impractical for that age group.
A sixth form of writing self-regulation that is primarily personal or covert
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is time planning and management (Zimmerman, Greenberg, & Weinstein,

1994). Two studies on writer’s ‘‘block’’ have indicated the importance of
time management strategies in solving this problem. In one, Rennie and
Brewer (1987) interviewed 10 graduate students who had writer’s block dur-
ing the writing of their thesis, and another 6 who were not blocked, in order
to ascertain the different circumstances and strategies between the two groups.
The authors found that blocked writers reported feeling less in control of the
task, one way being that they had no sense of time management. In contrast,
the unblocked writers reported specific time management plans that they set
for themselves and followed. Boice (1982) took this phenomenon a step
further by attempting to unblock the writing of six academicians who had
come in for help in this regard. The intervention consisted of a variety of
program elements, including the production of charts in which subjects
planned their schedule to include writing, and then recorded their daily output.
Results indicated a lessening of writer’s block.
Another way of examining planning and time management, on a more
‘‘micro’’ scale, is to look at pre-writing time, or the amount of time taken,
after students receive a topic, before they begin writing. Presumably much
of this time is spent generating and organizing ideas, and in other respects
planning what they are going to write. Pianko (1979) observed that her college
subjects, some of whom were remedial, spent only an average of 1.26 min
pre-writing an essay topic. As brief as this was, she found that the non-
remedial students spent significantly longer pre-writing (1.64 min.) than did
the remedial students (1.00 min.). Supporting these results, Kennedy (1985)
found that, after reading sources from which to write an essay, higher ability
college students spent more time planning than did lower ability students. Of
course, because no attempt was made to determine the activities subjects
engaged in during prewriting time, it cannot be concluded that pre-writing
was synonymous with planning; indeed, the pauses during pre-writing could
plausibly be due to factors such as anxiety, writer’s block, or lethargy.
One study that did quantify planning was conducted by Spivey and King
(1989). They utilized students from the 6th, 8th, and 10th grades, asking them
to write a synthesized informational report based on three related encyclopedic
articles. The investigators observed a number of writing process variables,
including amount of written planning and amount of time spent planning,
and noted any relationship to writing product as scored holistically. They
found that the quality of final essay was significantly related to amount of
written planning prior to writing it. Indeed, the amount of planning was found
to play a greater role in determining quality of finished writing product than
the number of revisions that subjects made.
A seventh form of writing self-regulation that is primarily personal or
covert in form is goal-setting (Schunk, 1990). Three investigators studied
goal-setting and self-monitoring together. In Hull’s (1981) study, for example,
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college undergraduates in experiment one were assigned a goal for amount

of journal writing they were to complete, and then they recorded the number
of words they actually wrote per day; this resulted in longer journals. In
experiment two, some subjects were asked to set their own goals, while other
students had them set by the teacher. Results showed that these two groups
did not differ significantly in word output, though both groups did write
longer journals than when goals were not set. Hopman and Glynn (1989)
using low-achieving high school students as subjects, asked them to set goals
regarding the length of their papers before actually writing them. This proce-
dure combined with another self-regulatory strategy of having students count
the number of words that they wrote (self-monitoring) and having them check
to see that they achieved their goals (self-evaluative judgment) produced
longer and better written essays. Graham, MacArthur, Schwartz, and Page-
Voth (1992) trained four fifth grade learning-disabled students to set both
process and product goals in the writing of essays and then to later assess
the achievement of these goals. It was found that the training enhanced both
knowledge of the writing process and the quality of the writing product itself.
Furthermore, maintenance effects were positive.
In Voth and Graham’s (1993) study, reported by Graham and Harris (1994),
junior high school students were asked to select two different goals prior to
the writing of their argumentative essays: goals to support the thesis of their
paper and goals to refute possible arguments against their thesis. On average,
there was an improvement in writing outcome, both quantitatively and qualita-
tively. However, goal setting was shown to be more effective for the harder
task of refuting counterarguments than the somewhat easier task of making
arguments to support their thesis. Thus, goal-setting may be seen to be more
useful for more cognitively challenging tasks.
More recently, two other investigators examined the effects on writing
outcome of different types of goals set. Schunk and Schwartz (1993a) assigned
fifth grade students into one of three goal-setting conditions: a goal to learn
a paragraph writing strategy (process goal), a goal of writing good paragraphs
(product goal), or a goal to work effectively (general goal). Results showed
that students in the process goal condition exhibited the greatest writing
product, particularly when their goal-setting was combined with progress
feedback, as it was in half the group. There was a positive maintenance effect
for the process goal group as well. In a related study, this time carried out
with gifted fourth grade students, Schunk and Schwartz (1993b) assigned
subjects to one of three conditions: a process goal for learning a paragraph
writing strategy, the same process goal combined with progress feedback,
and a product goal for writing good paragraphs. Results showed that the
process goal condition produced significantly better paragraphs than did the
product goal condition, and that the process goal plus progress feedback
condition produced the best writing of all.
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A eighth form of writing self-regulation that is primarily personal or covert

involves self-evaluative standards and reactions (Zimmerman & Bandura,
1994). The majority of studies investigating self-evaluation have focused on
revision processes, whereby subjects compare their written work with either
self-set or externally set standards of performance and then make modifica-
tions accordingly. Hillocks (1986) conducted a meta-analysis of six studies
of secondary and higher education students, in which subjects were asked to
evaluate their own and/or others’ writing. On the basis of this meta-analysis,
he concluded that using specific criteria to evaluate writing led to better
writing and rewriting than other, more traditional methods, such as grammar
instruction. This was presumably due to students’ internalizing these standards
and then applying them to their own writing in the present and future. For
instance, Beach and Eaton (1984) gave college undergraduates a self-evalua-
tion form to help them analyze their goals and text inconsistencies in their
writing. When using this evaluation form, subjects found more text problems
in their writing than when they did not use the form, and they were relatively
accurate in their error detection.
Fitzgerald and Markham (1987) trained 30 sixth grade students in revising
processes for 13 lessons in order to ascertain the treatment’s effect on subse-
quent revisions and on quality of the final writing product. Inherent in the
revision instruction was a self-questioning strategy utilizing standards of writ-
ing quality, as modeled by the instructor. The revising processes included
addition, deletion, substitutions, and rearrangements. After the intervention,
subjects wrote and revised a story. Results showed that the experimental
group, compared to a control group that simply read literature, did improve
their knowledge of the revision process, made more revisions in their stories,
and showed improved writing quality across drafts, though this last difference
was not as strong as expected.
A study, conducted by Dickerson and Creedon (1981), investigated the
effect on writing outcome when students were asked to self-select standards,
as opposed to using teacher-set standards. Second and third grade students
were randomly assigned to two experimental groups (self-set standards versus
teacher-set standards) or to a control group (no standards). Subjects then
proceeded to complete a series of writing tasks and math tasks. Results with
regard to the writing task showed that both experimental groups displayed
better writing than did the control group, and, more importantly, that subjects
in the self-selected standards condition performed better than subjects in the
teacher-selected standards condition. Thus, the more self-regulated standards
strategy proved to be the more helpful.
Deshler, Ferrell, and Kass (1978) sought to assess differences in self-
evaluative criteria between learning-disabled and normal students when read-
ing student-generated as well as externally generated text. These researchers
concluded that the two student groups used similar criteria for finding errors
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in externally generated material and displayed the same number of text incon-
sistencies. Interestingly, the learning-disabled students were less likely than
normal students to label as errors elements in their own writing. Thus, the
ability to self-evaluate may someday be used as one criterion for diagnosing
learning disability.
Still other researchers sought to determine the effects of self-regulation
training on the motor aspects of writing, such as handwriting and neat-paper
skills. Anderson, Paine, and Deutchman (1984), gave 10- to 12-year-old spe-
cial education students 6 weeks of training in neat-paper skills. Students who
were trained to use a self-monitoring checklist transferred neat-paper skills
to other writing assignments significantly more than did students who received
direct instruction only. Therefore, self-evaluations and judgments can be help-
ful in a broader range of writing tasks than revision alone.
A ninth form of writing self-regulation that is primarily personal or covert
involves cognitive strategies for writing (Pressley, McGoldrick, Cariglia-
Bull, & Symons, 1995). Bloom (1988) examined the various organizational
strategies that ninth grade students chose to use in their prewriting samples
for a statewide proficiency test. The investigator found that 65% of these
subjects did pre-write, and she classified their pre-writing into fifteen catego-
ries. Of the students who pre-wrote, the majority (53%) re-wrote the topic
and then jotted down one or more ideas, 15% made lists, 9% created a formal
outline, 4% used diagrams, and the remainder used a number of miscellaneous
procedures, such as freewriting and doodling. Results showed that, on average,
the two most organized pre-writing strategies—outlining and list making—
resulted in the highest scoring essays. In contrast, the less organized, though
more frequently used strategy of re-writing the topic and jotting down ideas
led to essays of the poorest quality.
The outlining strategy was investigated in more depth by Kellogg (1988),
who trained an experimental group of college undergraduates to prepare a
written outline for a business letter. Compared with the control group, the
experimental group had better writing quality overall and specifically in three
of the five areas: idea development, effectiveness, and language usage. Inter-
estingly, students who outlined spent less time on planning and revising and
more time on writing than did their control counterparts, presumably because
having an outline reduced cognitive overload. The experimenter then added
a third condition: training in constructing mental outlines, and he found that
for essay quality, both outline conditions were better than no outline, and
that students in the two outline conditions did not differ on any of the writing
quality measures.
The large majority of studies on strategy induction train students to use a
number of self-regulatory strategies as a group. Graham and Harris (1989b),
for example, trained subjects to use a mnemonic strategy for writing essays—
TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons, Examine reasons, Ending)—along with
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other self-regulatory strategies such as goal setting and self-monitoring; this

and other ‘‘package’’ training studies will be examined in more detail later
in this paper. However, one such study was conducted by Day (1986). College
undergraduates were assigned to one of four conditions: summarization train-
ing alone (a ‘‘content’’ strategy), self-management training alone (involving
such activities as paying attention and checking), and two summarization
plus self-management training conditions. After training, subjects summarized
eight expository texts. On an immediate post-test, subjects who had the com-
bined treatment summarized better than did subjects who had only summariza-
tion training, although this difference was not statistically significant. On
the delayed post-test, however, subjects in the combined summarization/self-
management group did summarize significantly better than did subjects who
received training in summarization alone. Thus, induction of self-regulated
learning strategies enhanced the learning of a content strategy.
Mental imagery is the last form of writing self-regulation that is personal
or covert in form (Pressley & Levin, 1977). It has been investigated primarily
in the context of creative writing, particularly among gifted students. Long
and Hiebert (1985) taught a group of gifted students in grades three to six to
use mental imagery for the purposes of writing a story. These subjects wrote
a story before and after intervention. A comparison of these stories showed
an improvement among subjects in both writing quantity and quality. Jampole
(1991) assigned gifted elementary students into one of three conditions: men-
tal imagery training, writing practice, and control. After the intervention,
subjects wrote creative writing samples, and these samples were analyzed for
originality and inclusion of sensory descriptions. Results showed the imagery
training group to have scored the highest on these measures, and the effects
persisted on a delayed post-test. In a subsequent study, Jampole, Mathews,
and Konopak (1994) assigned gifted third and fourth grade students to the
same conditions as in Jampole’s (1991) study. Mental imagery training oc-
curred in five sessions. This time the investigators assessed a wider variety
of creative elements in subjects’ stories that were written as post-test mea-
sures. They concluded that mental imagery training enhanced subjects’ story
structure originality, novel qualities, emotional tone, unusual response, and
story style, although no effects for story length were seen.
In a secondary school setting, Chevreau and Smith (1989) had students
engage in guided fantasy as a way of coming up with images for a creative
writing assignment. The writing they produced was assessed on a number of
linguistic criteria, including novelty of images produced, unusual vocabulary,
and degree of adjectival modification. Results showed no superiority of guided
fantasy over non-imaginal modes of creative writing methodology. Unlike
other studies on mental imagery, this one used older subjects, and this suggests
perhaps a waning effectiveness of self-imagery over time. This hypothesis
should be examined in future research.
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Finally, as theorized from a social cognitive perspective, there is evidence

to support hypotheses about the relationship between self-efficacy for writing
and writing outcomes. For example, Shell, Murphy, and Burning (1989),
using college undergraduates as subjects, showed that self-efficacy for read-
ing, along with outcome expectancy (beliefs that successful task performance
will lead to a particular outcome), accounted for significant variance in reading
achievement; furthermore, self-efficacy for writing, but not outcome expec-
tancy, accounted for significant variance in expository writing achievement.
Confirming these results with younger students, Burning (1987) demonstrated
that self-efficacy for reading was significantly associated with reading
achievement, and self-efficacy for writing was significantly associated with
writing achievement for students in the 4th, 7th, and 10th grades. McCarthy,
Metier, and Rinderer (1985) assessed the writing ability and writing self-
efficacy of college freshmen in beginning writing courses. Students wrote in-
class expository essays at the beginning and end of the semester, and teachers
assessed each essay for writing achievement. The investigators found that
self-efficacy for writing was significantly associated with this measure of
writing skill.
More recently Risemberg (1993), in a study discussed previously, showed
self-efficacy for writing, along with organizing ability and self-directed infor-
mation-seeking, to uniquely predict comparison-and-contrast essay writing
outcome. Zimmerman and Bandura (1994) utilized freshmen in writing
classes, half of whom were in advanced classes. Four instruments, including
one for academic self-efficacy, were administered in the beginning of the
semester, and subjects’ final course grades were used as the writing outcome
measure. Results showed final course grade to be significantly correlated with
self-efficacy, and a causal model via path analysis showed self-efficacy, self-
evaluative standards, and grade goals to be the constructs that had the greatest
impact on writing outcome.
As the evidence mounts that individual self-regulatory elements have a
positive impact on writing outcome, investigators have been combining a
number of these elements into complex ‘‘packages’’ of self-regulatory strate-
gies. The majority of subjects exposed to this kind of training are adolescent
or pre-adolescent students with writing problems. Glomb and West (1990),
for example, introduced a self-management writing strategy to high school
students with behavioral disorders. Subjects were taught to self-instruct, set
goals, self-record progress, and self-evaluate. Ultimately, these subjects wrote
longer, neater creative writing compositions that contained fewer mechanical
errors. Likewise, Seabaugh and Schumaker (1994) taught eleven high school
students four self-regulatory strategies: behavior contracting, self-recording,
self-monitoring, and self-reinforcement. This training package resulted in the
previously non-compliant and low achieving subjects completing substantially
more writing assignments than they did prior to intervention.
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The most extensively utilized self-regulated strategy package, developed

by Graham and Harris (1994), is known as self-regulated strategy development
(SRSD). Over the course of this procedure, students are taught to set goals,
self-record their progress by graphing the output of targeted elements, use a
mnemonic strategy specific to the writing task, utilize self-instructions for
strategy induction, and self-evaluate their progress. The SRSD methodology
has been utilized with success to improve a wide variety of writing elements,
including vocabulary diversity (Harris & Graham, 1985) and revising (e.g.,
MacArthur, Schwartz, & Graham, 1991).
One example of SRSD was demonstrated by Graham and Harris (1989b).
Here a strategy to facilitate the generation, framing, and planning of argumen-
tative essays was the focus of study. The subjects, three sixth grade LD
students, were trained to use the mnemonic strategy TREE (Topic sentence,
Reasons, Examine reasons, Ending) in conjunction with the above mentioned
self-regulated learning strategies. Writing skills were assessed via a multiple-
baseline across-subjects design. Dependent measures were presence of essay
elements, coherence, number of words written, story grammar elements (for
a generalization task), overall quality, and self-efficacy concerning their ability
to write an argumentative essay. Each subject wrote at least 11 essays, some
during baseline and others after treatment. The effects of training were most
consistently positive with regard to essay elements, story grammar elements
(the generalization task), and overall quality, with all three subjects showing
considerable gains. In the areas of coherence and number of words, two of
the three subjects showed substantial improvement. In addition, two of the
three subjects considerably increased their self-efficacy ratings from pre- to
post-treatment. Some maintenance effects were seen 12 weeks after treatment.
In another such study, Graham and MacArthur (1988) taught students a
strategy for revising argumentative essays on a word processor. The mne-
monic strategy for this task was to SCAN each sentence (does it make
‘‘Sense?’’ is it ‘‘Connected’’ to my belief? can I ‘‘Add’’ more? ‘‘Note’’
errors). The instructor took each of three 10- to 11-year-old subjects through
the SRSD procedure. This time, dependent measures included number of
revisions, syntactic level of revisions, number of words written, writing con-
vention errors (spelling, capitalization, and punctuation), overall quality, and
self-efficacy. Subjects wrote 13, 18, and 25 argumentative essays over the
course of the experiment in this multiple baseline design. All subjects after
treatment carried out substantially more revisions, and at a higher syntactic
level. All three wrote longer compositions of considerably higher quality.
Two of the three subjects made far fewer errors in spelling, capitalization,
and punctuation. And, finally, all subjects reported significantly higher self-
efficacy scores.
Taking self-regulation research a step further, Graham and Harris (1989a)
performed a components analysis of SRSD in order to determine the incre-
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mental effects of self-regulation over basic strategy training. Subjects were

fifth- and sixth-graders, some of whom were learning-disabled. The LD sub-
jects were randomly assigned into one of two conditions—content strategy
alone or content strategy plus self-regulation training, which included goal
setting, self-recording, and self-evaluation. Non-LD students were given no
training and were used as reference points. The content strategy taught con-
sisted of a story part reminder (Who, What Å 2, Where, Why, How Å 2).
The stories generated by subjects were scored for the inclusion and quality
of eight story grammar elements and for overall quality. Results showed that
LD students in both experimental groups had significantly more story gram-
mar elements during the post-test, the generalization test, and the maintenance
test than during the pre-test, though there were no differences between the
two groups in any of the trials. Furthermore, the grammar element scores on
the post-test were undistinguishable from the scores of the normal students.
Likewise, in ratings of overall quality of stories and in measures of self-
efficacy, both experimental groups improved from pre-test to post-test, but
the two groups did not differ from each other. The investigators, surprised
that self-regulation did not show an incremental effect over basic strategy
training, attributed this to the fact that basic strategy training included implicit
self-regulation instructions. Indeed, during Step 4 of their procedure (model-
ing the strategy and self-instructions), the instructor modeled self-regulatory
statements for both experimental groups; these statements included problem
definition, planning, self-evaluation, and self-reinforcement.
Subsequently Sawyer, Graham, and Harris (1992) assigned subjects learn-
ing composition skills in text structure to either full SRSD training, SRSD
minus goal-setting and self-monitoring, direct instruction of writing, or no
training. This time there was no difference between the two self-instructional
strategy training groups on writing measures, and both groups outperformed
the group that had composition strategy training alone. Nevertheless, only
the group that included the full set of self-regulatory training components
showed nonsignificant differences when their writing was compared with that
of normally achieving peers.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
To novice writers, the need for self-regulatory control of writing is not
obvious, but writing experts have cautioned them to look beyond the polished
text products to the underlying processes. ‘‘Good writing does not reveal its
making. The problems are solved, the scaffolding has been removed, and the
discarded building materials have been hauled away’’ (Murray, 1990, p. 5).
Research that was surveyed indicates that self-regulatory processes for writing
can be defined and assessed reliably in both field and laboratory settings.
Second, there is evidence that students who used one or more of the ten major
types of self-regulatory processes wrote more effectively, such as producing
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more informative papers, better organized papers, and attained higher grades
in writing. Third, there is also psychologically important evidence that stu-
dents’ use of self-regulatory processes enhances their self-efficacy to write.
These changes in self-image have important motivational implications, such
as improved effort to write, persistence when writing is difficult, and intrinsic
interest in writing. Although these motivational effects have been demon-
strated outside the field of writing, they have not been widely demonstrated
in research on writing to date. This issue should be a focus of future research.
Because of the solitary nature of most writing contexts, it is easy to overlook
the important role of social influences on self-regulatory processes, but auto-
biographic sources and empirical studies revealed writers’ reliance on others
to learn new techniques, to provide information regarding topics, to provide
feedback to assist revisions. The effectiveness of self-selected models, tutors,
or books was shown in recent training studies that used modeling, verbal
instruction and feedback to teach students to write, including youngsters with
learning disabilities. The critical aspect of effective writers is their proactive
efforts to seek out others who can be helpful and to avoid social distractions.
Indeed, writers such as Franklin, Proust, and Hugo developed highly imagina-
tive techniques to regulate their social and physical environments. It is clearly
important that theoretical models of writing be capable of explaining both
social and self-directed sources of personal regulation (Schunk & Zimmer-
man, in press). Social cognitive theory is well suited for this purpose because
of its triadic and self-efficacy dimensions, however, a remaining issue is how
novice writers shift from a state of dependence on others to a capability for
self-regulated interdependence.
One of the most important issues involves linkages between various self-
regulatory processes and self-beliefs. The proposed self-regulatory model of
writing assumed that goal setting, strategy selection and use, and performance
self-monitoring to be reciprocally linked as part of a self-directed feedback
loop. Using path analysis procedures, Zimmerman and Bandura (1994) have
demonstrated that personal efficacy to self-regulate writing not only mediates
the influence of writing ability and writing outcomes, it predicts writers’
goal setting, self-evaluative standards as well. Graham and Harris and their
colleagues used an experimental methodology to answer the interrelation
question. They factorially manipulated the interaction of various self-regula-
tory components. Both descriptive and experimental approaches showed that
writing self-regulation involves a complex system of interdependent processes
that are closely linked to an underlying sense of self-efficacy.
Schunk and Swartz (1993a, 1993b) have reported interesting evidence that
setting strategic process goals has a greater impact on perceptions of self-
efficacy than product or outcome goals. In accordance with a feedback loop
hypothesis, the students’ speak-aloud results during their writing indicated
that goal setting had affected their method of self-monitoring as well. The
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question emerging from these results is why a strategic process orientation

raised perceptions of self-efficacy to write more than an outcome orientation?
Students who set strategic process goals eventually wrote more effectively,
and thus, self-monitoring would strengthen their self-beliefs. However, were
there other benefits for a process orientation to writing? Is it possible that
strategy process attributions are more protective of self-efficacy beliefs than
outcome attributions because failures are linked causally to potentially con-
trollable strategies? Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons (1992) have suggested
that strategic attributions were not expected to diminish self-efficacy drasti-
cally until students exhaust their entire repertoire of strategies, and even then
writers might seek social assistance from knowledgeable others before giving
up. It is thus also possible that the students wrote more effectively because
any deficiencies in writing were perceived as less personally threatening. The
issue of the interrelation of self-monitoring, performance attributions, and
self-efficacy beliefs during writing clearly needs further study.
A key instructional implication of a self-regulatory approach to writing is
the value of using self-monitoring to create a personal feedback loop. As
students record changes in specific aspects of their writing, they are compelled
to analyze and react to their writing at a metacognitive level. For example,
when students keep records of the length of sentences they write as well as
those of exemplary models, they begin to appreciate the need for variation
in sentence length. Similarly when students keep records of their sequence
of simple, complex, and compound sentences, they become more aware of
the structure of sentences they create. Self-monitoring forms can be developed
to help students improve virtually any aspect of their writing, including their
management of time and motivation as well as their linguistic production.
When these performance records include specific goals and strategies students
are using, the results can help them discover which methods work best for
them personally. For example, a record of written output when the television
is turned on versus off can reveal to students whether it is a distraction or a
benefit. Zimmerman, Bonner, and Kovach (in press) have developed self-
recording methods that transform key qualitative features of writing into
quantitative ones that can be graphed over time and changes in conditions.
When personal graphs of increases in targeted writing features also include
improvements in grades on writing assignments, students’ perceptions of self-
efficacy and motivation are significantly enhanced. Little effort has been made
to examine the effectiveness of self-recording during writing instruction to
date, and consequently, we suggest this issue should become a priority in
future research.
In conclusion, we stand at the threshold of understanding how writing
becomes self-regulated. Writing is one of the most complex skills taught in
school (Murray, 1990), and there is widespread evidence that it is poorly
learned (De Witt, 1992). According to both bibliographic and empirical evi-
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dence, developing and using this valuable skill requires high levels of self-
regulation. Finally, we now know that writing self-regulation is not a single
capability but a complex system of interdependent processes that are closely
linked to an underlying sense of self-efficacy as a writer. Although this com-
plexity adds to the challenge of teaching writing, a social cognitive account
of these processes and self-beliefs can serve as a vehicle for guiding future
research and instructional development.
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CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 22, 73–101 (1997)

ARTICLE NO. EP970919

RESEARCH FOR THE FUTURE

Becoming a Self-Regulated Writer:

During this era of cyberspace and microcomputers, skill in developing

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need to include the role of social, motivational, and behavioral processes as

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and keeping a diary of pages written each day (influences a and b) or by

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Personal (Covert) processes

Ten common forms of triadic self-regulation reported by well-known writ-

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literary progress is more evident (Schunk, 1990). Reciprocally, students’ level

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is time planning and management. Many novelists carefully organize their

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ists have learned to imagine a plot, character, or setting in gory, romantic, or

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setting. Risemberg (1993) assigned college undergraduates the task of writing

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writer’s block, using a behavioral-cognitive treatment that included personal

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high-IQ students employed the same number of self-instructions, which in

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is time planning and management (Zimmerman, Greenberg, & Weinstein,

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college undergraduates in experiment one were assigned a goal for amount

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A eighth form of writing self-regulation that is primarily personal or covert

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other self-regulatory strategies such as goal setting and self-monitoring; this

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Finally, as theorized from a social cognitive perspective, there is evidence

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The most extensively utilized self-regulated strategy package, developed

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mental effects of self-regulation over basic strategy training. Subjects were

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question emerging from these results is why a strategic process orientation

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