Intentionality of Social Emergent Explicit Regulation (EER) in Collaborative Groups

Ascertain whether social Emergent Explicit Regulation (EER) instances observed during collaborative scientific inquiry—such as initiating name exchanges, discussing academic majors, and teaching sign language within newly formed IMPRESS program student groups—are intentionally enacted to build or improve collaboration among group members, or whether they primarily arise as incidental social conversation to pass time during experimental data collection.

Background

The paper introduces the Emergent Explicit Regulation (EER) framework to analyze students’ in-the-moment regulatory moves in collaborative scientific inquiry settings. Among the five target areas of EER (cognition, behavior, motivation, emotion, social), the authors highlight several social EERs observed when a newly formed group engaged in greenhouse effect modeling activities in the IMPRESS program.

These social EERs included asking for and signing each other’s names, discussing majors, and teaching and learning signing while waiting for data, which helped maintain group cohesion. However, the authors explicitly note uncertainty about whether such social regulatory moves are deliberate efforts to foster collaboration or simply incidental interactions to fill waiting time, leaving open the question of their intentionality and function in collaborative regulation.