ABSTRACT
What we presently know about self-directed learning 1 in educational contexts is mostly inferred from surveys and from structured, decontextual-ized learning tasks (Blumberg & Michael, 1992; Dolmans & Schmidt, 1994; Hmelo, Gotterer, & Bransford, 1997; Newble & Clarke, 1986). In the necessary methodological step of aggregating data, what is often masked in these studies is the entity central to the construct: the self.
