ABSTRACT
This chapter examines methodological advances in the study of interpersonal regulation of learning that have emerged in recent years. This area of research is still at a nascent stage. Hence, the methodological tools used to observe, capture, analyze, and represent the interactive and dynamic nature of interpersonal regulation vary widely across studies. This plurality of methodologies reflects a range of underlying conceptual frameworks, data sources, and features of interactions considered important to understanding interpersonal regulation, and a concern for the establishment of reliable coding systems to enable the examination of links between coded observations and other variables of interest. These methodologies also often reflect the relative importance that researchers ascribe to the role of social regulatory mechanisms in self-regulation versus the role of self-regulation in social regulation, an issue addressed by Volet et al. (2009b) in their case for an integrative perspective. This issue is important since it often determines whether the chosen object of analysis is the individual within a group, the group as a social entity, or as proposed by Greeno (2006), “learning in activity”: a dynamic system which includes learners’ interactions with their peers and the environment but also the cognitive dimensions involved in their individual and shared content processing.
