The capacity to plan, manage, monitor and reflect on one’s learning—i.e. to engage in self-regulated learning (SRL)—is vital to academic success; seminal research identified fourteen SRL strategies and showed that learners’ achievement was strongly predicted by their use of SRL strategies (Zimmerman and Martinez-Pons, 1986); this difference in achievement can be accounted for by strategy presence, frequency and consistency (Nandagopal and Ericsson, 2012). Empirical evaluations indicate that most SRL tools do not demonstrably improve actual SRL behaviour—most studies did not directly measure changes in students’ SRL strategies (Edisherashvili et al., 2022), highlighting a gap in understanding of whether these tools are truly helping students internalise better self-regulatory practices or just providing short-term performance boosts. This talk describes STARS, a co-designed digital tool for mobile and desktop to help bridge this gap. In particular, it supports learners in deploying a set of SRL strategies, helping them to (i) internalise standards (ii) set specific learning goals (iii) self evaluate their work against a standard and (iv) develop a plan to close the gaps between their work and the required standard. We used an action research methodology to evaluate STARS with undergraduate learners across three disciplines: computing, social care, and sustainable community development as well as postgraduate learners in STEM and humanities. We report on results to date including recorded learner behaviour as well as learner reflections. Our findings suggest the need for a means to overcome barriers including the need to integrate digital scaffolds into core assignments to reduce the initial effort barrier and increasing student agency in strategy selection to enhance long-term value.