Exploring facilitation strategies to support socially shared regulation in a problem-based learning game

Abstract

Successful problem-based learning (PBL) often requires students to collectively regulate their learning processes as a group and engage in socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL). This paper focuses on how facilitators supported SSRL in the context of middle-school game-based PBL. Using conversation analysis, this study analyzed text-based chat messages of facilitators and students collected during gameplay. The analysis revealed direct modeling strategies such as performing regulative processes, promoting group awareness, and dealing with contingency as well as indirect strategies including prompting questions and acknowledgment of regulation, and the patterns of how facilitation faded to yield responsibilities to students to regulate their own learning. The findings will inform researchers and practitioners to design prompts and develop technological tools such as adaptive scaffolding to support SSRL in PBL or other collaborative inquiry processes.

Keywords

• problem-based learning
• socially shared regulation
• facilitation
• collaborative inquiry
• conversation analysis