Interpersonal Regulation of Learning and Motivation

Methodological Advances

Simone Volet, Marja Vauras, Simone Volet, Marja Vauras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136305566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Interpersonal Regulation of Learning and Motivation is the first book in the field to focus on major methodological advances in research on interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation. Interest in developing ways of capturing the dynamics of interpersonal regulation in real-life learning interactions is growing rapidly. Understanding these dynamics is particularly timely given the increased use of collaborative learning activities in schools and university settings, as well as through face-to-face and computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments.

While groups and collections of individuals in social interaction are expected to bring their own motivations and goals to the learning situations, it is also assumed that these are further shaped through interaction, as the group activity evolves. Research methodology publications in the field of learning, regulation and motivation are still dominated by a focus on the individual. The study of collaborative learning at both conceptual and methodological level has not incorporated the significance of social regulatory processes of learning and motivation. This is a new development in the field and one covered by this book.

The book contains numerous illustrations of innovative:

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• Methodological approaches to study and interpret the dynamics of interpersonal regulation

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• Data sources and data representations to capture scaffolded instruction

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• Theory-based analytic methods to investigate interactions in real-life collaborative learning

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• Coding systems and social software tools for gathering and analysing interactive data.

Interpersonal Regulation of Learning and Motivation brings together the work of scholars who have been studying interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation at the boundaries of the individual and the social, and who have made original methodological contributions to the study of interactive learning environments. In combination, their work provides a range of distinctive and original conceptual and methodological contributions to this under-examined and vital field of research, making this an essential read for any researcher or student interested in collaborative learning and motivation.

Chapter 1

The study of interpersonal regulation in learning and its challenge to the research methodology

Marja Vauras and Simone Volet

Introduction

Aristotle’s classic thesis in Metaphysica that “the whole is something over and above its parts and not just the sum of them all” (Book H, 1045: 8–10; see Corning, 2002) has stimulated scientists in different disciplines for centuries. Evolving ideas concerning human perception from the early days of modern behavioral sciences offer a good example of how, through scholarly debates and empirical studies, this basic claim has become more nuanced. In the spirit of Wertheimer, Koffka (1935: 176) pointed out that “it is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.” Later, analysis of distinct characteristics in relation to interpretations and contexts became the focus of research into perceptual processes. The current academic discourse of the whole–part relationship both in life and human sciences takes place under the concept of emergency (e.g. Corning, 2002), the concept imminent to all adaptive, self-organizing, or regulating systems. Self-regulating systems, for example living systems in biology, are too complex to be deduced from the properties of the elements alone. Living systems are defined as self-organizing systems that have the characteristics of life and that experience interactions and exchange with their environment to adapt and self-maintain (Miller, 1978; see also Volet et al., 2009b: 221). The same holds for self-regulating social constellations, such as groups, networks, and societies, in psychology or sociology. In modern thinking, the interaction and dynamics of the system’s components step into view along with emphasis on contextual effects. As Corning (2002: 11) put it, “wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s).”

These notions discussed across sciences that deal with complex, self-regulated systems are pertinent to the study of interpersonal regulation in learning, particularly in collaborative contexts constituting a group of individuals either in synchronous or asynchronous interaction. A group as an emergent social system is a qualitatively different entity from individuals working side by side (Hinde and Stevenson-Hinde, 1987; Salomon and Globerson, 1987). Thus, the motivational and relational characteristics and functioning of groups are best understood as emerging from a complex dynamic situational interplay across different systemic levels (Volet et al., 2009b). In this interplay, emergent interpretations, motivations, emotions, and identities co-constituted by individuals and the social context become dancing partners (cf. Nolen and Ward, 2008). Group participants bring their own motivations and goals as well as their own histories, cultural norms, and emotional interpretation tendencies to the learning situation (e.g. Vauras et al., 2009b). Goals and motivations are further shaped through a group’s joint enterprise, as learners’ identities and positions within the group evolve along with the characteristics and structure of the group itself (see, e.g. Horn et al., 2012). This underscores the idea that in all real-time learning, from solo to collaborative, the emergent functioning and outcomes are, to quote Goldstein (1999: 57), “neither predictable from, deducible from, nor reducible to the parts alone”, i.e. in this case to individual participants and their properties. This thesis highlights how the pursuit of understanding learning that takes place within social constellations of individuals poses a tremendous challenge for research methodology and tools as we try to solve how to articulate the individual and social simultaneously within an intertwined system. This challenge brings us to the very heart of this volume, where the focus is on major methodological advances in research on interpersonal regulation and motivation in learning.

The main aim of this volume is to bring together the work of scholars who have been studying interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation at the boundaries of the individual and the social, and who have made original conceptual and methodological contributions to the study of interactive, reciprocal learning at the crossroads of different scientific traditions and perspectives. In combination, their work provides a range of distinctive and novel conceptual and methodological contributions to this under-theorized and under-examined field of research. This volume provides empirical illustrations of various research designs, methodological approaches, data, and data analyses related to interpersonal regulation in different instructional contexts across diverse instructional learning environments and learning groups. The potential of this volume to foster readers’ understanding of the latest methodological development in research on interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation is further enhanced through each author’s cross-referencing and positioning of their own approach. A concluding chapter brings together the different contributions, and identifies common challenges, leading to suggestions for future research.

Learning and motivation in evolving, socially shared contexts

Complex problem solving, decision making, and knowledge construction in modern society emphasize the need for collaborative activities. The ability to work, participate, and learn in varying, changing, and socially shared and networked contexts, and continuously (re)construct new individual and collective knowledge and competencies concern us all through life-long learning. Expertise and competencies develop from early stages along with voluntary self- and other-initiated practice in everyday situations taking place in between guided training and formal instruction (cf. Ericsson, 2006). In schools and higher education, the deliberate use of groups and collaborative settings in general to foster learning and collective competencies is emphasized and has rapidly increased. At the same time, the physical boundaries of collaboration intersect with advances in communication technology, and increasingly and more routinely collaborative activities occur not only in synchronous face-to-face groups but asynchronously via networked participants.

Research in interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation is, thus, highly timely. The area is rapidly increasing but the development of suitable methodologies for capturing, analyzing, and interpreting the interactive, dynamic, emergent, and multi-dimensional nature of interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation is challenging. On the premise that group learning activities bring together “multiple self-regulating agents [who] socially regulate each other’s learning” (Volet et al., 2009a, p129), the study of interpersonal regulation of learning is located at the articulation of individual and social processes (Järvelä et al., 2010). Here, individual, social entities (e.g. groups) and social contexts (e.g. educational communities) are conceptualized as self-regulating and co-regulated systems at the same time (cf. Volet et al., 2009b). In combination with the focus on learning and motivation, this calls for approaches that combine interpersonal processes with individual cognition. Such a case was made by Greeno (2006: 92), who argued that understanding “learning in activity” required a focus on activity systems “in which learners interact with each other and with material, informational and conceptual resources in their environment.” His case for a situative perspective that combines the strengths of cognitive science and interactional research has inspired recent theoretical and methodological developments in research on the social aspects of learning and motivation (Nolen and Ward, 2008; Volet et al., 2009a). Shifting the focus to groups as integral activity systems (cf. Greeno and Gresalfi, 2008: 170; Nolen and Ward, 2008) does not lose the individual from sight; rather it facilitates investigation as people-in-social activity over time (Horn et al., 2012; italics added by the authors of this chapter).

Evolving from the purely individual or social, and sharing the general idea of people-in-social activity in time-framed contexts, the authors of this volume cross-fertilize conceptual and methodological ideas and innovations that stem from cognitive and interactional perspectives (such as socio-cognitive, socio-cultural, systems dynamic, ethnographic). In this way they move beyond the traditional boundaries of genres of research (e.g. between metacognition, motivation, personality, social psychology, psychopathology). The authors of this volume demonstrate how recent methodological advances in the study of interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation build upon different and rapidly developing fields and trends of research.

The first trend has been labeled the “second wave” of self-regulated learning research (Zimmerman, 2008). This research has moved the study of self-regulated learning from the investigation of offline aptitudes in self-regulation using questionnaires and interviews (Winne and Perry, 2000), to the examination of self-regulated learning processes during the course of learning in situated, social contexts, using online trace methodologies. Innovative studies capitalizing on technological advances and the development of specialized software have gathered evidence of regulatory activity in computer-based learning environments (Winters et al., 2008). This includes, for example, trace logs in computer-assisted environments (Perry and Winne, 2012), and think-aloud protocols in hypermedia environments (Azevedo et al., 2010). A key purpose of this research is to capture and measure dynamic and situated cognitive and metacognitive processes involved in self-regulated learning as it unfolds in real time. This “second wave” of self-regulated learning research has also tried to establish the extent of convergence between observed online processes and self-reported offline measures of self-regulated learning, with findings of various degrees of correspondence between the different data sources (Azevedo et al., 2010; Zimmerman, 2008).

The second field of investigation, which research on interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation has built upon, is the extensive and fast developing body of empirical work on computer-mediated or computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) (Hmelo-Silver et al., in press; Puntambekar et al., 2011; Special Issue of Metacognition and Learning, 2012). Many studies have examined the nature of regulation processes in virtual social spaces for learning (e.g. Hadwin et al., 2010; Janssen et al., 2012; Lajoie and Lu, 2012; Perry and Winne, 2013; Saab et al., 2012). The analysis of CSCL data is commonly based on written transcripts of online interactions, which enable the classification of individual contributions into theory-based categories. An alternative approach has involved rich, descriptive, qualitative analyses of the transcripts of interactions. None of these methods are ideally suited to analyze group discourse. The development of software systems that can record multiple traces of collaborative learning and logs of time-stamped trace data is only recent (Hadwin et al., 2010; Winne and Hadwin, in press). Overall, the disproportionate amount of CSCL research in comparison to face-to-face collaborative learning research in the last decade reflects the unique opportunities afforded by technology to record traces of collaborative learning. This development has taken place despite most collaborative learning activities in real-life learning environments still being conducted in face-to-face settings.

The third field of research originates from the early work of Vygotsky in the 1930s (Vygotsky, 1978), which later inspired both socio-cultural and socio-cognitive research focused on instructional practices and interpersonal regulation. The study of scaffolding exemplifies these trends. In their classic studies Gallimore and Tharp (1990) drew attention to how teacher-dominated forms of discourse (such as recitation or lecture, dominant in classrooms) limit opportunities for interpersonal regulation, and thus impede engagement by depriving students and teachers of the opportunity to build common values and perceptions. Their longitudinal study further powerfully showed how joint participation by teachers and students was difficult to achieve despite intensive, long-term training of teachers. Understanding of instructional practices and strategies, and how they can support students’ engagement and learning, led to a legion of studies, which often relied on observations and descriptions of the classroom practices of teachers in order to get a grip on the process and appearances of scaffolding (see, for a review, van de Pol et al., 2010). Predefined, theory-based, coding schemes to analyze scaffolding were rare, one early exception being the study of Meyer and Turner (2002; cf. also Stefanou et al., 2004). In current studies on scaffolding, and mediation processes in general, the key characteristics (contingency, fading, and transfer of responsibility) of scaffolding are beginning to gain greater recognition (Salonen et al., 2005; van de Pol et al., 2010; see also Vauras et al., 2013), bringing more dynamic notions and process-oriented methods into the repertoire.

The fourth field of research that has started inspiring the study of interpersonal regulation of learning and motivation is not yet established in educational research. Although having deep roots in social psychology and psychopathology (see, e.g. Granic and Patterson, 2006), dynamic systems theory and dynamic systems analysis methods (e.g. Dumas et al., 2001; Granic and Lamey, 2002; Thelen and Smith, 2006) are the emerging genres in learning and educational contexts (Salonen et al., 2005; van Geert and Steenbeek, 2005; Vauras et al., 2009; Vauras et al., 2013). Dynamic systems principles provide a general framework for describing how interaction patterns emerge, become amplified, and stabilize over time through a system’s internal regulatory processes (Granic and Dishion, 2003; Granic and Patterson, 2006). The notion of attractors (cf. discourse concerning emergency in general; Goldstein, 1999) is a key concept that dynamic systems theory offers for understanding the behaviors of people interacting. Typically, the systems are pulled towards som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. The study of interpersonal regulation in learning and its challenge to the research methodology
• 2. Video analysis of self-regulated learning in social and naturalistic contexts: The case of preschool and primary school children
• 3. Tracing students’ regulation of learning in complex collaborative tasks
• 4. Metacognitive regulation in collaborative learning: Conceptual developments and methodological contextualizations
• 5. Understanding quality variation in socially shared regulation: A focus on methodology
• 6. Interpersonal regulation in instructional interaction: A dynamic systems analysis of scaffolding
• 7. Observing interpersonal regulation of engagement during instruction in middle school classrooms
• 8. Analyzing regulation of motivation as an individual and social process: A situated approach
• 9. Recontextualizing practices: Situative methods for studying the development of motivation, identity, and learning in and through multiple contexts over time
• 10. Interpersonal regulation in collaborative learning activities: Reflections on emerging research methodologies
• Index