Investigating upper-secondary school learners' contributions in co-regulation and socially shared regulation during collaborative learning

Abstract

The participation of group members is vital in collaborative learning (CL) to achieve a shared goal. When challenges are inevitably faced during CL, retaking control of the shared learning processes calls for group members' regulatory contributions. Yet, research on how learners contribute to group-level regulation is limited. To understand how regulation manifests in collaborative group contexts, there is a need to understand the role that individual learners' contributions play. Therefore, the current study aims to explore how learners contribute to regulation in an authentic face-to-face CL setting. The study participants comprised 94 seventh graders. The context of the study was a physics course where participants were videotaped during their collaborative work across four 90-min lessons. Thirteen different contributions were identified based on detailed qualitative video analysis. The results from process models show that co-regulation of learning (CoRL) and socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) episodes commonly initiated in a similar manner and shared the most typical path in terms of the contributions. However, differences emerged, highlighting the central roles of guiding and following in CoRL, and sharedness and co-construction in SSRL. The study sheds light on how learner contributions should be considered while trying to understand regulation among CL groups.