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

2016, International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Recent theoretical underpinnings of successful computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) have suggested that it is not only necessary to create environments that allow for learners to work together on complex problems requiring collaboration (i.e., where the benefits of working with others is greater than the transaction costs involved in communicating and coordinating actions; P. Kirschner, Kirschner, & Janssen, 2014), but where the communication and coordination are well regulated. For collaborative learning to be effective, students must explicate their thoughts, actively participate, discuss and negotiate their views with the other students in their team, coordinate and metacognitively regulate their actions between them (Järvelä & Hadwin, 2013), and share responsibility for both the learning process and the common product (Fransen, Weinberger, & Kirschner, 2013). In collaborating, not only cognitive and metacognitive aspects of subject matter content play an important role, but also the social and meta-social aspects of collaboration (Puntambekar & Hubscher, 2005; Rienties, Tempelaar, Van den Bossche, Gijselaers, & Segers, 2009). Despite extensive empirical research in CSCL, there is still little research about how groups, and individuals in groups, can be supported to engage in, sustain, and productively regulate collaborative processes. This may be due to overemphasis on developing and testing the functionality and usability of technology-based tools for sharing information or emphasized attention to the content related knowledge co-construction in CSCL. It may be also because of the variety of ways to conceptualize the concept of regulation in CSCL (Järvelä & Hadwin, 2013). This symposium-an extension of the 2013 Special Issue in Educational Psychologist on the theories underlying CSCL and its use-introduces the ongoing new generation approach to theory building in CSCL; examining and clarifying the role of regulation in collaboration and pushing the discussion further. Papers examine aspects of socially shared regulation, regulative scripting, awareness tools to promote regulation and how multimedia environments can promote regulation. Each paper in the symposium: (a) specifically identifies what is regulated (e.g., task knowledge, own prior knowledge, goals and plans, strategic knowledge, motivation or emotions, etc.) in CSCL, (b) presents empirical findings to show how regulation emerges or influences collaboration, (c) identifies and discusses conditions under which regulation emerges and can be supported, and (d) identifies targets for future research about regulation in CSCL. Looking at the major problems encountered when using CSCL as pedagogy, one can conclude that many of them might be solved if we would progress in concepts and tools that could help the participants in CSCL groups in the regulation of their working and learning within the group (Järvelä, Kirschner, Panadero, Malmberg, Phielix, Jaspers, Koivuniemi, & Järvenoja, 2014). Being able to strategically regulate one's own learning and that of others is a vital and increasingly important 21st century skill. This includes, for example,