Emergent Explicit Regulation in College Students Collaborative Scientific Inquiry Learning, Framework and A Case Study

Abstract

Small group activities have been widely adopted in college level science courses. As students participate in these activities, it is important to consider how group members collectively regulate their activity and complete group task. Regulation in a group often involves adaptive responsivity from group members when they notice and deal with a challenge. The theoretical framework of socially shared regulation emphasizes group members collaboratively regulating within the group but does not focus on portraying how the shared regulation is developed in the moment. Currently, the field lacks a framework characterizing the momentary development of a regulatory action in a group. Our study addresses this gap. In our video data, incoming college students were enrolled in a summer program designed to promote students metacognitive skills to be incorporated in their study of science. We have observed various moments in which the students spontaneously made a move to regulate the hands-on, inquiry activity in completing their tasks and achieving group goals. We developed a framework called Emergent Explicit Regulation to characterize those moments. The EER framework captures students in the moment regulatory moves to respond to a challenge, articulating how those moves emerge, in what ways they are explicit and regulatory. In this paper, we first introduce the EER framework and situate the EER framework in the context of collaborative scientific inquiry learning. We then present a case study where we applied the EER framework to identify typical EER instances in one small group when the students completed the task of building a model to represent the climate of the Earth atmosphere. They worked collaboratively, faced and handled various challenges, completed the group task, and demonstrated multiple EERs in different psychological areas and in the inquiry practices designed in the activity.