Supporting students’ emotion awareness and regulation during an online group project

Research has established that emotions significantly impact students’ learning, achievement, and health. However, there is limited research on how to support students’ emotion awareness and regulation specifically in online group learning environments. Such contexts present unique challenges to emotion regulation compared to in-person settings, such as reduced opportunities for peer support and delays in response times when communicating with others. The work reported in this paper aimed to address this gap by trialling and evaluating a novel digital tool aimed at supporting students’ emotional awareness and regulation. The context was a 9-week online group project in an undergraduate distance learning module. To accomplish this, short questionnaires were embedded into the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) pages of the module at various stages of the group project; these questionnaires asked students about their emotions and provided prompts and support for emotion regulation. Since their inclusion, these questionnaires have been found to enhance emotion awareness in many students, as well as support the regulation of emotions in the group project. These findings highlight the potential for digital tools to effectively support self-regulation of students’ emotions while participating in online group projects in a distance education setting.