How Socio-Cognitive Information Affects Individual Study Decisions

Abstract

Metacognitive self-regulation theories assume that individual monitoring guides study decisions. However, self-regulated online learning is not done in isolation and inherently social. Group awareness research suggests that socio-cognitive information may be a strong asset to collaborative and individual learning. Integrating individual research traditions into a social setting, our experimental study (N = 61) investigates how visualizing socio-cognitive information influences core individual learning processes, especially the search for information, the learners’ self-evaluations of knowledge and learning outcomes. While on the surface study behaviour seemed not to be affected by the availability of socio-cognitive information, more profound analyses revealed that learners provided with partner information did rely less heavily on initial self-evaluations, but adapted their evaluations and focused more on the partner information provided. Knowledge gain was not affected. In conclusion, social context can be an important factor in self-regulation emphasizing that individual and collaborative research traditions may complement each other.