Exploring how group cooperative learning affect college students’ online self-regulated learning—the important role of socially shared regulation, perceived task value, and teacher support.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is the key variable to ensuring success or failure in online learning. However, in real-world online learning, college students face SRL deficiency, such as procrastination, decreased learning motivation, poor time management, and resource management. Therefore, scientifically exploring how to effectively promote the development of online SRL has become an important issue. Group cooperation, as an important carrier of peer support, supports students in small group to participate in learning through providing a small-scale learning environment and promotes individual knowledge construction. To explore the mechanism of how group cooperation affects online SRL, a survey was conducted on Chinese college students who participated in online/blended group learning that involved group cooperation. A total of 439 valid participants were collected and statistically analyzed. The results showed that the overall level of online SRL among the participating college students was relatively low (mean score of 3.23 out of 5), and the highest mean score was for environmental structuring (3.54), while the lowest mean score was for task strategies (3.09). Latent profile analysis was used to categorize the students into four groups, and the majority of Chinese college students fell into the “below average” and “low score” groups (275 people), accounting for 62.6% of the total population. The results of the structural equation model showed that the transactive memory system and group cohesion in the group cooperation had no significant effect on online SRL. Only socially shared regulation had a significant positive effect (β = 0.675*). Socially shared regulation can predict college students’ online SRL through the mediating effect of task value. Online SRL can significantly predict school achievements, and teacher support plays a moderating role in the relationship between task value and online SRL. This study provides empirical evidence for subsequent research on exploring the relationship between group cooperation and online SRL from the perspective of socially shared regulation, and lays a certain empirical foundation for proposing appropriate pedagogical intervention programs for subsequent research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]