Social interaction - What can it tell us about metacognition and coregulation in learning?

This article brings to the fore the sociocognitive aspect of metacognition and processes involved in coregulation. We argue that coregulation in a learning situation that involves the interaction of teachers and students or peers is based on awareness of the partners' cognition, metacognition, affect, and motivation, as well as interpersonal perception processes and/or interpersonal relational control processes. One aspect of metacognition, particularly relevant to coregulation of learning, is metacognitive experience, i.e., how the interacting partners feel and what they think about the task at hand. Awareness of one's own and the other's cognition and of metacognitive experiences is necessary for metacommunication control processes. Evidence from two independent studies suggests that there can be misperception of the interacting partners' metacognitive experiences because of "theory-driven" conceptions of the other person or lack of metacognitive coregulation because of the prevalence of relational control processes. We suggest that this may lead to scaffolding mismatch in instruction, failure in coregulation, and negative feelings and behaviors of the interacting partners in certain learning situations.