Sense of community and self-regulation. Reciprocal interaction in a Knowledge Building Community

The research on the efficacy of on-line knowledge building communities has brought to light the crucial role of two interconnected factors: the sense of community (SoC) and the self-regulation of learning (SRL). Sense of community is defined by McMillan and Chavis (1986) as the sense of belonging and hard interdependence of a person within a group and the perception of being part of a very reliable and stable group. The theoretical construct of self-regulation is described by Zimmerman (2008) as a group of pro-active self-directive processes and beliefs about self used by the student to acquire cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, behavioural and environmental competences to improve personal academic results (Pintrich, 2000; Boekaerts & Corno, 2005). The aim of our research is to identify the relationship between sense of community and self-regulation and to verify the existence of a directional relationship between them. We hypothesized that more self-regulated students are more able to develop sense of community in the first few days of activity and that the early development of the sense of community will allow students to enrich their SRL competencies and to develop the sense of community even more. Participants of our research are 90 university students, members of a Knowledge Buiding Community at Milano Bicocca University. Students are asked to fill in two questionnaires in the first two weeks and at the end of the course: the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ; Pintrich et al., 1993; Italian version developed by Bordin et al, 2009) and the “Scala del Senso di Comunità nei corsi online” (sense of community in online course scale, Perrucci et al. 2009). We correlate the early SoC general index with all MSLQ components at the beginning and at the end of the course. Structural equation models will be used in the next few months to analyze directional relations between the two constructs. Data show significant correlations between early SoC and all SRL competencies at the beginning and at the end of the course: pre-test strategies (r=.32, p<.001), pre-test motivation (r=.24, p<.01), post-test strategies (r=.30, p<.01), post-test motivation (r=.29, p<.01). Moreover, results show correlation between final SoC and all SRL outgoing scores: post-test strategies (r=.28, p<.01), post-test motivation (r=.29, p<.01). Our results suggest the existence of a relation between SoC and SRL competencies and show the need to develop students’ personal self-regulation competencies and to foster the development of a sense of community from the beginning of the course. The results lead us to verify more in depth the existence of a directional relation between the two constructs (SRL and the sense of community) with the intent to develop specific models of the relations between them