Jonna Malmberg

Exploring Socially Shared Regulation in the Context of Collaboration

Socially shared regulation of learning refers to processes by which group members regulate their collective activity. Successful individuals regulate their motivational, cognitive, and metacognitive engagement. Our hypothesis is that successful groups also share in regulating group processes. Following our earlier conceptual and empirical work on the social aspect of motivating and regulating learning (Hadwin & Järvelä, 2011; Järvenoja & Järvelä, 2009; Järvelä, Volet, & Järvenoja, 2010), our research questions are as follows: (a) What challenges do individuals and groups report experiencing during collaborative group work? (b) How do students collectively regulate these challenges at the time, and in future collaborations? (c) How do collaborative learning outcomes compare between groups with varying degrees of emerging shared regulation? We present an empirical study in which 18 graduate students worked in collaborative teams of 3–4 over an 8-week period. The nStudy (Winne, Hadwin, & Beaudoin, 2010) software was used for collaborative planning and work, as well as face-to-face and online collaboration between team members. Data included individual and collaborative statements about collaborative challenges, collaborative statements about contextual and future regulation strategies, collaborative learning performance, and log file traces of students’ contributions to collaborative chat discussions and planning activities. Findings indicated that the students expressed multiple challenges resulting in 3 kinds of regulation over time profiles: strong, progressive, and weak shared regulation. We also conclude that successful collaboration not only requires self-regulation but also allows each team member to support fellow team members to successfully regulate their learning and the team to come together to collectively regulate learning.

Socially shared regulation of learning in CSCL: understanding and prompting individual- and group-level shared regulatory activities

The field of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is progressing instrumentally and theoretically. Nevertheless, few studies examine the effectiveness and efficiency of CSCL with respect to cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social issues, despite the fact that the role of regulatory processes is critical for the quality of students’ engagement in collaborative learning settings. We review the four earlier lines in developing support in CSCL and show how there has been a lack of work to support individuals in groups to engage in, sustain, and productively regulate their own and the group’s collaborative processes. Our aim is to discuss how our conceptual work in socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) contributes to effective and efficient CSCL, what tools are presently available, and what the implications of research on these tools are for future tool development.

Promoting socially shared regulation of learning in CSCL

Socially shared regulation plays a critical role in successful collaboration.Process discovery is used to reveal how groups progress in regulated learning.High performing groups evidenced temporal variety in challenges and strategies.Low performing groups were often incapable of recognizing challenges. Collaborative groups encounter many challenges in their learning. They need to recognize challenges that may hinder collaboration, and to develop appropriate strategies to strengthen collaboration. This study aims to explore how groups progress in their socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) in the context of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Teacher education students (N=103) collaborated in groups of three to four students during a two-month multimedia course. The groups used the Virtual Collaborative Research Institute (VCRI) learning environment along with regulation tools that prompted them to recognize challenges that might hinder their collaboration and to develop SSRL strategies to overcome these challenges.In the data analysis, the groups reported challenges, and the SSRL strategies they employed were analyzed to specify the focus and function of the SSRL. Process discovery was used to explore how groups progressed in their SSRL. The results indicated that depending on the phase of the course, the SSRL focus and function shifted from regulating external challenges towards regulating the cognitive and motivational aspects of their collaboration. However, the high-performing groups progressed in their SSRL in terms of evidencing temporal variety in challenges and SSRL strategies across time, which was not the case with low performing groups.

Understanding Regulated Learning in Situative and Contextual Frameworks

Research on self-regulated learning has focused predominantly on a static individual level to explain various strengths and weaknesses of learners. However, much learning today is highly interactive and technologically enhanced, which an individually oriented perspective to regulated learning does not consider. In this article we discuss regulation by bringing situational and contextual variation of regulated learning into focus. We introduce a situative perspective on regulation of learning and give arguments and examples on how it can offer a way to conceptually and empirically grasp multiple layers of regulated learning in social contexts. We also compare the given perspective with sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives to regulated learning. We conclude that the situative perspective can significantly enrich understanding about individual and group learning as a regulated activity, because it offers a way to examine regulation beyond the individual while not losing sight of learners as individual subjects.

How Individual self-regulation affects group regulation and performance: A shared regulation intervention

This study explored the relationship between individual self-regulated learning (SRL), socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL), and group performance plus the effect of an intervention promoting SSRL. We hypothesized that SRL would influence SSRL and group performance as groups with high SRL students will be better regulated and that the intervention would promote SSRL over time. The results revealed a significant relationship between SRL and SSRL, but no significant effects of the intervention on group performance. The limitations of the intervention are discussed and form the basis for future design of environments to promote SSRL. The main conclusion is that SRL is an important predictor of SSRL and should be considered when designing small group activities and their environments.

Higher education students’ learning challenges and regulatory skills in different learning situations / Desafíos de aprendizaje y habilidades de regulación en distintas situaciones de aprendizaje en estudiantes de educación superior

Abstract First-year higher education (HE) students experience different challenges during their studies. These challenging learning situations can trigger self-regulated learning (SRL) skills, which students use to handle these situations. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate (a) first-year HE students’ cognitive, motivational and emotional challenges experienced in both individual and collaborative learning situations and (b) the relationship between SRL skills and experienced learning challenges. Participants included 107 first-year pre-service teachers. Data consisted of students’ self-reports via (a) open-ended answers on a challenge questionnaire and (b) Likert-scale items from MSLQ and MRS questionnaires. Based on students’ SRL profiles, differential effects on the challenging experiences were investigated. The results show that different aspects related to students’ cognition, motivation, emotions and well-being were challenging for students. Also, connections were found between students’ SRL skills and the types of experienced learning challenges. Students with high SRL reported fewer learning challenges related to motivational aspects and more challenges related to cognitive aspects than students with low SRL.

Measuring group dynamics in an elementary school setting using mobile devices

Mobile instrumentation provides researchers and professionals the opportunity to collect data on several aspects of human life. In this paper we discuss our initial experiences on collecting data via mobile instrumentation in an elementary school. We augmented a classroom with mobile phones and Bluetooth beacons to capture student experiences as well as their relative distance to each other during a collaborative group project. We describe the study, and present lessons learned when instrumenting such a unique school setting with young participants.

Monitoring in collaborative learning: Co-occurrence of observed behavior and physiological synchrony explored

Abstract Although research on collaborative learning suggests that monitoring plays an important role in successful regulation of the collaborative learning process, little is known about how students attend to it together. This study explores monitoring in collaborative learning. Specifically, it studies how students in a group monitor their cognitive, affective and behavioral processes during their collaboration, as well as how observed monitoring co-occurs with their physiological synchrony during the collaborative learning session. Data was collected from 48 Finnish highschool students who were learning about nutrition in groups of three. The session was videotaped and coded in terms of monitoring of cognition, behavior and affect. Students’ arousal was measured as electrodermal activity with wearable sensors and used to calculate physiological synchrony between the students. Three case groups, with priority on the quality of the data, were chosen for detailed analysis. The results indicate that the main targets of monitoring for these case groups were cognition and behavior, while monitoring of affect occurred the least. Most of the student pairs inside the groups showed significant amounts of physiological synchrony. High values of physiological synchrony occurred when monitoring was frequent. Time series analysis showed a weak positive connection between monitoring and physiological synchrony for two groups out of three. These results indicate that physiological synchrony could potentially shine a light on the joint regulation processes of collaborative learning groups.