Exploring self-regulation in group contexts

Research on group processes that advances student learning has the potential to support current efforts aimed at introducing technological innovations into classrooms that encourage student collaboration. The current study focuses specifically on group processes that emerge during collaborative learning by exploring how groups use behavioral and cognitive regulation when working on collaborative tasks. Within our analyses, we examined evidence for group selfregulation among two 4-person groups of sixth grade students while they worked on three different group activities as part of a mathematics unit on statistics and graphing. Results suggest that groups made consistent efforts at regulating their learning and engagement, but that the overall quality of group regulation varied. In addition, our findings support the application of the general categories of behavioral and cognitive regulation to regulatory processes in groups, but suggest that specific aspects of self-regulation may be especially important in group contexts.