Bridging gaps and moving forward: Building a new model for socioemotional formation and regulation

Abstract

Collaboration is an important lifelong and career skill, and collaborative learning is a growing pedagogical practice. Students often struggle, however, to negotiate, manage conflict, and construct knowledge with other group members. These struggles can lead to negative interactions, resulting in negative emotions. Students in collaborative settings must be able to effectively regulate emotions at both the individual and group level. More research is needed on the emotions that develop in collaborative learning environments and how they relate to socioemotional regulation (i.e., the collective regulation of emotions in group settings) in order to provide a better conceptualization of emotions in small group learning. In this article, I explore ideas from traditional, social, developmental, and educational psychology, combining key elements from seminal theoretical models to introduce a new model for emotion formation and regulation in collaborative learning environments.

Acknowledgments

I thank Kathryn Wentzel and the reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and suggestions, which were instrumental in helping me improve the manuscript. I also want to thank my comprehensive exam and dissertation committees, and especially my Ph.D. advisor Jeff Greene, for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.