In the fast-paced, changing global economy, it becomes increasingly important to develop self-directed learning (SDL) skills in our students to stay competitive and adaptive to the ever-changing needs. In support of more SDL teaching and innovation activities, Singapore Polytechnic (SP) has developed the SDL framework. However, many practitioners are unfamiliar with it. There is also currently a lack of knowledge of the appropriate ways of simulating and introducing SDL to our students. This paper thus aims to use a feedforward process where some interventions to promote SDL for our students were tested out. In the pilot action research, two instances of SDL strategies were carried out for 96 freshmen engineering students from Oct 2018 to Feb 2019. In addition, students were asked to do a simple self-assessment on SDL to see if they can use this as a tool to assess their SDL behaviours and suggest appropriate changes. To our surprise, 4 out of the 5 classes rated themselves significantly higher compared to their lecturer’s rating of themselves. A simple follow up with the students and classroom observations revealed that many of them were seem multitasking during the lessons, and not revising what they have learned as regular as we would expect them to. We see these factors as the contributing factors that could hinder students from being more self-directed. Plans to improve on student’s study habits thus become the focus for the next action research. We see that the use of action research methodology help us to kick start this journey. The continued use of this approach is believed to help educators design better lessons that are suited for our engineering student’s profile, thus effectively helping them to transit from being too dependent to more self-directed.
