The effects of group awareness support combined with collaboration scripts on adaptive social regulation in promoting students' challenge awareness and social regulation strategies

Abstract

Adaptive social regulation refers to students' strategic adaptation of social regulatory actions in response to challenges. If group members enact social regulation strategies to cope with encountered challenges, adaptive social regulation occurs; if not, maladaptive behavior may arise. Adaptive social regulation contributes to effective collaboration, but two obstacles may hinder this process: (a) a lack of challenge awareness and (b) insufficient social regulation strategies. Research indicates that the combination of group awareness support and collaboration scripts could be a promising approach to foster adaptive social regulation. A current limitation is that previous studies have mainly focused on fostering the regulation of just a very limited set of specific challenges, neglecting the promotion of students' awareness and regulation of multiple challenges during collaborative learning. Therefore, this study proposes a combined group awareness support and collaboration scripts tool, referred to as CACS. The research was conducted in a semester-long authentic English academic writing course. Thirty-two postgraduates were randomly assigned to five groups using the CACS tool (experimental condition) and five groups without it (control condition). This study not only quantitatively validates the effectiveness of combining group awareness support with collaboration scripts in enhancing adaptive social regulation, but also qualitatively explores the underlying mechanisms through interviews. The quantitative findings demonstrate that the groups in the experimental condition showed improvements in challenge awareness, adaptive social regulation, and the overall adoption of social regulation strategies. The qualitative analysis identifies key features of group awareness support and collaboration scripts that contribute to adaptive social regulation, including increasing students’ knowledge of challenges, facilitating a shared understanding of challenging situations, and encouraging the adoption of social regulation strategies through effective reflection.