Socially Shared Regulation and it's role in Collaborative Learning Groups

Malmberg and colleagues (2015) conducted a study to explore how groups are grouped in the context of computer-assisted collaborative learning (CSCL). The study was conducted with 103 students of an undergraduate education program. The participants were divided into 30 groups of 3 to 4 individuals who took a multimedia course that lasted two months. To collect the data, the OurEvaluator program was used, where the participants answered the questions about the strategies used to overcome the obstacles of the course. The data were interpreted after performing a content analysis of 383 responses on the SSRL strategies used by the participants. Specifically, it has been found that 134 of the responses are related to the cognitive function and the motivation for completing the task, while the answers have focused on the regular aspects of the task. The results reported that high performance teams used SSRL strategies to overcome the challenges of the course, while low performance teams did not use these strategies. The SSRL focuses on aspects of collaboration such as structuring the environment and time management during the first stages of collaboration. This research is relevant to this Series given that it gives us the form of cognitive regulation and the motivation for the effectiveness of the SSRL in team collaborative dynamics.

Sources and additional readings:

Malmberg, J., Järvelä, S., Järvenoja, H., & Panadero, E. (2015). Promoting socially shared regulation of learning in CSCL: Progress of socially shared regulation among high- and low-performing groups. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 562-572.