According to Zimmerman and Schunk (2008), good self-regulators “set better learning goals, implement more effective learning strategies, monitor and assess their goal progress better, establish a more productive environment for learning, seek assistance more often when it is needed, expend effort and persist better, adjust strategies better, and set more effective new goals when present ones are completed” than poor self-regulators (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2008, p.1). Since students who know how to self-regulate their own learner simply seem to be better learners, it is desirable to have a closer look at how they actually achieve self-regulation. As today’s learning environments are increasingly supported by digital technologies, it is important to see how students use these technologies in self-regulating their learning. This is the main theme of the three contributions to this part of the symposium on SRL in TELEs.

Päivi Virtanen, Anne Nevgi  Hannele Niemi from the University of Helsinki in Finland report on a study of undergraduate students who used an online tutoring system to develop SRL skills. They found that in order to support the development of SRL skills, the system needed to be tailored to different levels of SRL skills exhibited by their students.

Paula da Costa Ferreira and Ana Margarida Veiga Simão from Lisbon University in Portugal describe their research on the development of a questionnaire to assess SRL skills in primary school children. The instrument was based on Zimmerman’s cyclic model of SRL and exhibits good measurement properties.

Maureen Andrade and Ellen Bunker from Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, USA, in their contribution interviewed students who had taken part in an online English language course which was based on a model of self-regulated distance learning developed by the authors to find out if students’ SRL skills continued to have an impact on their academic success.