Academic success requires effective self-regulated learning (SRL), in which learners employ cognitive and metacognitive strategies during study. According to self-regulated learning models (e.g., Pintrich, 2000), learning contexts can influence which strategies learners adopt. In the current research, we examined whether incidental features of the training context affect learners’ subsequent strategy use when studying new passages. We trained participants to write cognitive and metacognitive reflections, as developed in Nückles et al. (2020), under distinct contexts that differed in physical features (e.g., font and reading presentation location) and subject domains (e.g., history or biology). During a later test phase, they independently wrote reflections on novel passages presented under varying conditions. When test conditions matched metacognitive training contexts, learners produced more metacognitive sentences; when test conditions matched cognitive training contexts, they produced more cognitive sentences. These findings indicate that features of the training context influence learners’ subsequent SRL strategy use, highlighting the importance of considering training contexts when teaching self-regulatory strategies.
