Abstract:

Theories of learning are grounded in sociocultural and social cognitive theory recognize the external influence on the learning process. Co-regulated learning (CoRL) has been relevant to optimize self-regulated learning (SRL) because the students may not acquire SRL by itself, requiring external support.

However, there is a limited study about CoRL and there is conceptual ambiguity and misunderstanding because different forms of conceptualization that appear in the literature (co-regulation of learning, externally regulated learning, socially shared learning, collaborative learning etc.). This fact impacted understanding at the theoretical (scientific research) and practical (adoption of pedagogical practices).

This work intends clarifies how the construct of CoRL is approached by the specialized literature and provide an overview about this concept. We adopted a narrative literature review methodology to identify the overview of how CoRL is understood and the dimensions that comprise its meaning. It was searched for papers from journals and proceedings, without time delimitation, in the Web of Science (Wos) database with the Boolean expression "co-regulation of learning" and "co-regulated learning".

We identified 45 papers, but were considered only studies in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. In this stage the study in Serbian was eliminated.
Because the nature of this study, after filtering, we excluded the papers that didn’t conceptualize CoRL.

In the extraction phase we performed floating reading of the 44 papers to identify how the authors understood CoRL, 3 papers were excluded because didn’t contribute to conceptualizing CoRL, remaining 41 eligible papers.

After the extraction phase - using the content analysis technique proposed by Bardin (1977) - we did a textual pre-analysis where, through categorical analysis, we divided the text into categories and we analogy grouped them. To concretize the categories, we explored the material extracted and grouped them, resulting in 3 final categories:
1. What is CoRL;
2. What is the purpose of CoRL; and
3. How CoRL it’s happening.
It is possible to deduce that CoRL is a social regulation, considering that learning can be mediated by other people (e.g., peers and teachers) or by external sources (e.g., didactic materials).

CoRL takes place during reciprocal sharing (decisions, ideas, experiences, goals, etc.) as well as during social interaction with each other or interactivity with different sources of information. Moreover, it is a fundamental element to support the development of self-regulation learning.

CoRL is also considered the bridge between SRL and SSRL (socially share regulation learning), enabling the transit between the regulatory stages.
Although this review has resulted in an overview of how this concept is understood. It’s still necessary to define frameworks that allow the theoretical delimitation of the concept.

We hope that the study will contribute to the mapping of the theoretical framework on CoRL and bring conceptual clarity.

Keywords:

Co-regulation of learning, Co-regulated learning, CoRL, Conceptualization, Narrative Literature Review.