The challenge of understanding, evaluating and providing feedback on regulation during group learning

Collaborative learning is widely used in academic and clinical health professions education and has a potential impact on future healthcare. Developing collaborative learning requires feedback but current approaches do not have a focus on the essential regulation aspect. There has been an increasing interest in the importance of regulation during learning in health professions education, including feedback on regulation, but the focus has been almost exclusively on the individual learner. The authors in this article propose a new conceptual framework to understand regulation during collaborative learning, with the intention to guide feedback for improving collaborative learning. The new conceptual framework integrates previous studies from other areas of education. Three varieties of regulation during collaborative learning are described in the framework: individual, co-regulation and shared regulation. Each variety of regulation has a focus on three essential components: task, social and motivation. Illustrative scenarios are used to describe how the new conceptual framework can practically guide feedback for developing collaborative learning in health professions education. The specific and additional focus on regulation can enhance current approaches for providing feedback and the authors discuss recommendations for practical implementation and future research.