Socially Shared Metacognition Among Undergraduate Students During an Online Geology Course

The ability to collaborate successfully with others is a highly valued skill in the modern workplace and has been reflected in the increase of collaborative learning methods within education. Research has highlighted the crucial role of self-regulation in successful collaboration, and more recently begun to focus on understanding how groups jointly regulate their interactions. The current chapter outlines a mixed-methods study that compared the impact of individual- and group-centered prompts on the frequency of social metacognitive activities during online group review activities with college students (N=48) from the USA. Tentative study findings suggested that group-centered problematizing prompts were moderately successful in shifting groups towards more social forms of regulation such as co-regulation; however, they were not enough to move groups towards shared metacognitive regulation. Further results revealed how the quality of group engagement was influenced by participants' perceived value towards activities, function and focus of metacognitive episodes, and group dynamics.