A preliminary study on socially shared regulation during online collaborative mathematics learning

Abstract

Successful online collaboration demands coordination among all the group members. This can be achieved through socially shared regulation of learning. Most studies deal with social shared regulation focusing on collective individual regulations during collaboration and absence of one of these processes would affect mathematical problem solving during collaborative learning. This study contributes to the emerging research on social shared regulation in collaborative learning where collaborative groups are analyzed as the unit of analysis. Participants include 21 students who are learning mathematics at a vocational training institution in an online collaborative learning setting. Students' discussion scripts were collected and analyzed to identify the group strategies to regulate learning during solving Mathematics problem based on a coding scheme. Preliminary findings indicated that content-monitoring, content-evaluation and task-planning were the most frequent applied regulation strategies during online collaborative learning. Online collaborative learning results in socially shared regulation in groups however co-occurrence of self-, co- and shared regulation in online collaborative learning varies in relation to the type of regulation strategies implemented by the group. Future study should investigate on the ways to encourage all forms of regulation to co-occur during online collaborative learning. Also, investigation on the quality of socially shared regulation (based on acquisition of mathematical knowledge and content of discussion) during online collaborative learning in relation to group learning performances should be carried out.