Title: Towards understanding self-organisation: How self-regulation contributes to self-organisation?

Authors: Adel M. Agina

Addresses: University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands

Abstract: Up to date, self-regulation learning has emerged in several areas of knowledge not only as a multidisciplinary, but also as an interdisciplinary research such as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and motivational learning. This article involves two parts. The first one is an analytical study which aims towards understanding self-organisation through analysis of the effect and contribution of self-regulation on self-organisation by considering the answer of two questions. The first question is: Why naming one definition and model of self-regulation is complex? And, the second is: How self-regulation contributes to self-organisation? The base of raising these questions is what has been reported out by Boekaerts and Corno (2005) concerning self-regulation in the classrooms is that |There is no simple and straightforward definition of the construct of self-regulated learning.| The analysis came up with the conclusion that self-organisation is the sum of all self-regulations. The second part of this article is an observational results of some common experimental instructions (do|s and don|ts) that the author used with 103 children less than seven years young (range = 2–6 years). This analysis is one of the results of a pilot study that the author ran as a part of his PhD research. The primary purpose of the observational results is to answer the question: To what extent does this instruction valuable to keep children acting during task performance? The importance of answering this question is that the amount of self-regulation is strongly influenced by the amount of external control, i.e. the more external control leads to less self-regulation and vice versa and the results showed that (1) the proposed do|s and don|ts instructions are not as they expected to be and minimising the external control requires the researchers in different areas of knowledge to develop a cohesive set of experimental instructions that help the external regulators to minimise their control upon children and (2) the complexity of the self-organisation acquisition is emphatically influenced by the difficulty of the self-regulation acquisition.

Keywords: activity theory; experimental instructions; young children; self-organisation; self-regulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2008.018838

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2008 Vol.18 No.3, pp.366 - 379

Published online: 19 Jun 2008 *

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