Regulation Alignment Planning (RAP)

Innovation work in university settings requires students to self-direct complex, ill-structured projects by developing essential regulation skills—self-regulated learning (SRL), metacognition, and emotional regulation (Faza & Lestari, 2025; Stanton et al., 2021). However, students face a misalignment where they struggle to recognize that stalled project progress is often a symptom of unaddressed regulation gaps, rather than them not putting in enough effort or the task beyond their ability. This cognitive separation causes students to cling to comfortable, ineffective learning patterns, leading them to neglect the difficult but necessary regulation practices that enable sophisticated learning, and causing confusion to compound into frustration. We present the Regulation Alignment Planner (RAP), a planning activity and computational tool integrated within the Situated Practice Systems (SPS) framework (Zhang et al., 2017). RAP intervenes by requiring students to define a riskiest risk, identify related regulation gaps, and visually map and explicitly justify how developing a specific practice directly unblocks project-level tasks. This integrated contribution accelerates the development of self-direction by challenging misconceptions of progress and providing a mechanism to self regulate on task level outcomes.