Proposal of Indicators to Evaluate Social Regulation in Cooperative Learning Tasks

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Cooperation plays a key role in educating our citizens. However, evaluating it within the field of education is a difficult task. In this study, boundaries have been applied in order to evaluate the interpsychological mechanisms involved in cooperation. The framework combines “social regulation” and “construction of knowledge”, with attention to the regulatory function of socio-cultural dialogue as important dimensions in evaluating cooperation. In order to validate the proposal, an empirical and experimental pilot study is carried out setting up groups of three students with different attitudes when facing cooperative learning tasks. These attitudes are identified through a questionnaire, which informs us that some of the students cooperate (group 1), some others collaborate/compliment (group 2) and the last three work independently (goup 3). The data is obtained from analysing the work of the three groups when they carry out an authentic writing task (like the Jigsaw cooperative working technique) using Camtasia Studio 5,0. The discussion sequences of the three groups were categorised using the Atlas-ti and at an episodic level. Once the coding of the sequences from the three groups was completed, we proceeded to select one of them at random, so that it could be evaluated by two external judges. Each coding discrepancy was resolved through discussion. The coding manual was subsequently refined, resulting in the removal of some ambiguities, which allowed for the earlier coding discrepancies and was used to code the remaining three videos. The reliability of the category system was tested by calculating the Kappa coefficient.
The research contributes towards a methodological guide that enables us to identify and to evaluate interaction models that emerge in cooperative tasks and that explain the social regulation of learning, whilst simultaneously gaining more knowledge.

Stream: Curriculum and Pedagogy; Student Learning, Learner Experiences, Learner Diversity

Paper: , Proposal of Indicators to Evaluate Regulated Learning Strategies in a Cooperative Task

I'm a teacher at university. I'm very interested in the study of regulation, that is, how students regulate theirselve when they learn. The present study is in relation with another study we are carring out called EVACOOP (Evaluation of cooperative and corregulative strategies in educational contexts through authentic tasks).(SEJ2007-60868/EDU). I+D+I (DGICYT –MEC). Coordinator: Carlos Monereo Font. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.