‘Supporting socially shared regulation during collaborative task-oriented reading’

This study examined how to improve students’ regulation of task-oriented reading (TOR). TOR encompasses reading and information processing needed to perform a specific task. Previous studies suggest students can benefit from a collaboration script to enhance socially shared regulation of TOR. The collaboration script elicits discussions about task perception, strategy selection, and strategy reflection. This study aimed to examine the depth and socially sharedness of metacognitive regulation when working with a collaboration script among 44 prevocational secondary school students working in groups of four. In addition, we examined the consequent improvement of individual task representation, strategy selection, and strategy reflection after working with the script. The analysis of group discussions indicated that the collaboration script facilitated mainly low-level metacognitive regulation of TOR. However, after working with the script, students did improve their ability to determine a correct representation of a high-level task and to reflect on the most appropriate reading strategy for these tasks. Hence, we concluded that the ‘Y-read?’ collaboration script did elicit shared regulation during TOR.