Proposal of indicators to evaluate social regulation in cooperative learning tasks

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. The discussion sequences of the five groups were
categorised using the Atlas-ti and at an episodic level. The results show different strategies to regulate
the behaviour during the cooperation, each of which seems to play a particular role with regards to
managing knowledge and/or social interrelations (cognitive and social dimensions of regulation). 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