Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 1 Socially Shared Regulation of Learning: A Review

Socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) has been recognized as a new and growing field in the framework of self-regulated learning theory in the past decade. In the present review, we examine the empirical evidence to support such a phenomenon. A total of 17 articles addressing SSRL were identified, 13 of which presented empirical evidence. Through a narrative review it could be concluded that there is enough data to maintain the existence of SSRL in comparison to other social regulation (e.g., co-regulation). It was found that most of the SSRL research has focused on characterizing phenomena through the use of mixed methods through qualitative data, mostly video-recorded observation data. Also, SSRL seems to contribute to students’ performance. Finally, the article discusses the need for the field to move forward, exploring the best conditions to promote SSRL, clarifying whether SSRL is always the optimal form of collaboration, and identifying more aspects of groups’ characteristics. Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 3 Socially Shared Regulation of Learning: A Review How students regulate their own learning through the use of strategies has been one of the most important topics in educational psychology for the past decades. These studies started receiving considerable attention after Flavell (1979) introduced the metacognition theory, and this attention continued when self-regulation theories started to develop (Boekaerts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). Currently there is a strong consensus that successful learners use a repertoire of strategies – cognitive, behavioral, and motivational – to guide and enhance their learning processes while completing academic tasks (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2008). The mainstream of research on self-regulation has focused on individual learning situations, but the notion that social context is important in students’ self-regulated learning is evidenced in a wide range of SRL researches, and research into social aspects of SRL has increased considerably in recent years (Hadwin, Järvelä, & Miller, 2011). Grounded in Zimmerman’s (1989) social cognitive model of self-regulation, research has been guided by the principles that social context and environment play a reciprocal role in self-regulated learning (SRL),which is embedded in social context and influence. SRL research is also framed by sociocultural explanations: social interactions with others who are more capable facilitate students’ development of SRL through internalizing the modeled cognitive processes (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978). The premise of this research is that SRL is an internal process, assisted and influenced by social interaction (e.g., Zimmerman, 1990). Thus, it means investigating social support as an independent variable on SRL and examining a wide variety of social supports, including modeling, scaffolding, and otherregulation, such as support provided by peers, teachers, and parents (McCaslin & Hickey, 2001; Paris & Paris, 2001). Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 4 The term co-regulated learning is grounded in Vygotskian views of higher psychological processes being socially embedded or contextualized (Vygotsky, 1978) and Wertsch and Stone’s (1985) notion that these processes are internalized through social interaction (McCaslin, 2009). McCaslin and Hickey (2001) defined co-regulation as a manifestation of emergent interaction within a zone of proximal development, and Volet, Vauras, and Salonen (2009) grounded the concept of other-regulation in the Vygotsky (1978) notions of the Zone of Proximal Development and scaffold guidance from other-regulation to self-regulation. Recently, the concept of socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) has emerged, which occurs when groups regulate together as a collective, such as when they construct shared task perceptions or shared goals. When groups co-construct plans or align monitoring perceptions to establish a shared evaluation of progress, they are engaged in shared regulation (Järvelä, Järvenoja, Malmberg, & Hadwin, 2013). SSRL involves interdependent or collectively shared regulatory processes, beliefs, and knowledge (e.g., strategies, monitoring, evaluation, goal setting, motivation, metacognitive decision making) orchestrated in the service of a co-constructed or shared outcome (Winne, Hadwin, & Perry, 2013; Järvelä & Hadwin, 2013). Interest in shared regulatory group processes has emerged since a change in pedagogical practices in current learning environments. Past decades have witnessed the success of collaborative learning, since it allows opportunities for shared knowledge construction and productive collaborative interactions (Dillenbourg, 1999; Roschelle & Teasley, 1995). Information and communication technologies as CSCL have fundamentally changed how people communicate, collaborate, work, play, and learn – but have also brought new challenges for group coordination, argumentation, and engagement (Järvelä, Volet, & Järvenoja, 2010). Hadwin et al. (2011) claim that regulated learning is the quintessential skill in collaborative learning. Working together means coconstructing shared task representations, shared goals, and shared strategies. It also means Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 5 regulating learning through shared metacognitive monitoring and control of motivation, cognition, and behavior. In sum, in the past decade there has been a shift in the SRL field: the role that collaborative learning and CSCL environments imply for the regulation of learning is now a research focus (e.g., Järvelä et al., 2010; Vauras, Iiskala, Kajamies, Kinnunen, & Lehtinen, 2003). The focus in this research line is on how the groups regulate their collaborative work and how this affects their learning experience as a group. Currently, the concept of socially shared regulation is increasingly being used in educational psychology literature and it is spreading to other related fields as well, for example computer-supported collaborative learning (Kirschner & Erkens, 2013). Compared to other regulatory concepts, such as SRL and co-regulation, the empirical evidence of regulatory processes in collaborative learning – this is to say, socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) – is still minor and distributed. Our aim is to review all empirical research about the existence of SSRL to find confirmation that it is a real construct that can be found in collaborative learning situations. Even though the research is still limited, a review of current empirical evidence is needed to increase conceptual clarity and find rigorous evidence of the phenomena. Related Concepts of Social Aspects of Regulated Learning In this section concepts which are closely related to SSRL will be discussed to clarify the differences and connections to SSRL. Vauras and Volet (2013) use an umbrella concept of ‘‘interpersonal regulation’’ to explain the functioning of groups as complex and dynamic situational interplays across different systemic levels (Volet, Vauras, & Salonen, 2009), showing that the study of interpersonal regulation of learning is located at the articulation of individual and social processes (Järvelä et al., 2010). Most conceptualizations of interpersonal regulation of learning research have been inspired by Greeno’s (2006) situative learning framework which integrates the individual and social perspective in ‘‘learning in activity’’ (Greeno, 2006, p. 92) and complements Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 6 the interactional focus on participatory processes with a cognitive focus on information processes. In those studies the concept of regulation has been used to describe the social processes the groups use to regulate their joint work on a task (Rogat & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2011) or the nature and processes of collaborative interactions (Volet, Summers, et al., 2009), and the conceptualization of regulation has been used as productive engagement in collaborative interactions. Other fields of interest to regulation of learning derive from sociocultural learning theory and the Vygotskian perspective. Concepts such as co-regulation and other-regulation have been used to explain the transitional processes toward self-regulation. According to McCaslin and Hickey (2001), the social system that individuals are part of is assumed to provide affordances and constraints for members to fully engage, to stay at the periphery until ready, or alternatively to avoid engagement. For example, Vauras and colleagues’ studies on socially shared co-regulation (e.g., Salonen, Vauras, & Efklides, 2005; Vauras et al., 2003) point to the social context as the developmental source of self-regulation, and provide support for the contention that teacher scaffolding, involving an emphasis on collaborative learning and opportunities for co-regulation, provided an appropriate context for students to learn and deploy academic regulatory strategies. The concept of metacognition is also related to the discussion of regulated learning. Dinsmore, Alexander, and Loughlin (2008) have discussed the clarity of meaning of metacognition, self-regulation, and self-regulated learning that are often used in parallel, even though they are different phenomena. The three concepts involve individuals’ monitoring and regulation of their learning, but the articulation of conceptual boundaries between these terms is overlapping. This is the case also when considering metacognition in social aspects of regulated learning. Metacognition researchers have acknowledged the role of peers and more knowledgeable others in mediating and sharing metacognitive knowledge (Brown, 1987; Goos, Galbraith, & Renshaw, 2002). For example, Artz and Armour-Thomas (1992) examined the role of metacognition in small-group mathematical problem-solving by tracking individual students’ cognitive and metacognitive behaviours and Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 7 concluded that successful group problem-solving requires the constant interplay of cognitive and metacognitive processes, and individuals competent enough to adapt the metacognitive statements to the process. Recently, researchers have described and operationalized metacognition at peer interaction or group level, and concepts such as socially shared metacognition (Hadwin, Oshige, Gress, & Winne, 2010; Hurme, Merenluoto, & Järvelä, 2009; Iiskala, Vauras, & Lehtinen, 2004) or socially shared metacognitive regulation (Iiskala, Vauras, Lehtinen, & Salonen, 2011) have emerged in reference to regulation of cognitive processes in interactive learning tasks. In these studies, the central idea has been that group members monitor and control each other’s actions to advance the group’s problem-solving. In this review the studies that have explored socially shared metacognition and socially shared metacognitive regulation have also been included for our analysis. This was done on the basis that SSRL also embraces the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of the group activity and, therefore, the inclusion of these studies offers a more complete picture of the regulation at the group level. Identified Challenges in the Field In spite of increasing interest in SSRL, three identified challenges emerge in this research area. The first challenge is dealing with conceptual clarity issues. There seem to be considerable differences in how authors and research teams define and operationalize social aspects of selfregulated learning, such as self-regulation, co-regulation, other regulation, high-level co-regulation, shared metacognition, self in social setting regulation, and socially shared regulation, which have been applied in recent theoretical and empirical discussions, and there still seems to be a lack of congruence (e.g., Dinsmore et al., 2008). Secondly, during the past few years, researchers involved in collaborative learning and CSCL research (Hmelo-Silver & Barrows, 2008; Kirschner & Erkens, 2013) and self-regulated Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 8 learning research (Hadwin et al., 2011; Volet, Vauras, et al., 2009; Winne et al., 2013) have worked in parallel to investigate ‘‘regulation of learning,’’ which has resulted in concepts which partly overlap, but still have various conceptual and empirical foci. For example, collaborative learning research and computer-supported collaborative learning research have targeted the general level of regulation of social interactions and knowledge co-construction processes (Saab, 2012). Research on team learning has introduced the concept of task regulation, with a focus on task and domainspecific regulation (Saab, van Joolingen, & van Hout-Wolters, 2012), and the concept of team regulation, focusing on social aspects of team formation (Fransen, Kirschner, & Erkens, 2011; Fransen, Weinberger, & Kirschner, 2013). The third challenge deals with methodological development. Research methods, which consider the interplay between individual and social processes as they unfold in authentic activity (Greeno, 2006), are still in their infancy. Even though there are new and promising methodological opportunities for studying interpersonal regulation (see Vauras & Volet, 2013), the lack of empirical findings may derive from inadequate methods, which focus either on individual regulatory activities or on social and collaborative interaction processes. For example, Järvelä and Hadwin (2013) have identified that current empirical research is obscure to differentiate shared regulation from shared knowledge construction, mostly because of a lack of methods and analytical techniques for examining individual and collaborative performance outcomes associated with interactional processes. These three challenges will be addressed through the empirical review conducted in this paper. Aim and Research Questions The aim of this review is to analyze the empirical evidence that supports the theoretical concept of socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) including the related terms socially shared Socially Shared Regulation of Learning 9 metacognition and co-regulation – when used with the purpose of distinguishing among qualitative different types of social regulation in collaborative learning. Our research questions are: a) What are the main characteristics of SSRL? b) Can different levels of social regulation be identified (SSRL vs. co-regulation)? c) What is the relationship of SSRL and other studied learning variables? d) What are the salient features of SSRL research? While answering these questions we will identify the following features of SSRL research: type of study, sample, subject or task, type of data, data analysis, procedure, and main results. We will also consider the limitations of the current research and discuss where the field should move next.