How the Monitoring Events of Individual Students Are Associated With Phases of Regulation

Abstract

The current study uses a within-person temporal and sequential analysis to understand individual learning processes as part of collaborative learning. Contemporary perspectives of self-regulated learning acknowledge monitoring as a crucial mechanism for each phase of the regulated learning cycle, but little is known about the function of the monitoring of these phases by individual students in groups and the role of motivation in this process. This study addresses this gap by investigating how monitoring coexists temporally and progresses sequentially during collaborative learning. Twelve high school students participated in an advanced physics course and collaborated in groups of three for twenty 90-minute learning sessions. Each student’s monitoring events were first identified from the videotaped sessions and then associated with the regulation phase. In addition, the ways in which students acknowledged each monitoring event were coded. The results showed that cyclical phases of regulation do not coexist. However, when we examined temporal and sequential aspects of monitoring, the results showed that the monitoring of motivation predicts the monitoring of task definition, leading to task enactment. The results suggest that motivation is embedded in regulation phases. The current study sheds light on idiographic methods that have implications for individual learning analytics.