Socioemotional regulation strategies in a project-based learning environment*

Students working in small collaborative groups may experience conflicts due to emotional issues at the individual or group level. Students need to regulate these emotions to avoid or reduce negative socioemotional interactions that can interfere with group performance. In this article, we studied the socioemotional regulation strategies used by graduate pharmacy students as they worked together in a small-group project-based learning environment. For this, we video recorded groups of students working on a class project in an authentic learning context. We conducted a qualitative extreme case study of three groups who, over six weeks, collectively rated their emotions as low, medium, and high to determine how the groups regulated their emotions, as well as the similarities and differences between the groups. We conducted three analyses: code mapping, descriptive, and thematic. We found that the socioemotional regulation strategies fell into one of the following five themes: behavioral, interpersonal, cognitive, motivational, and a combination of motivational and cognitive. We found that the most commonly used strategies were interpersonal and that the strategies were used at varying interpersonal levels (i.e., self, peer, and group). We also found that some groups used more appropriate strategies and that the use of strategies may have been connected to individual differences and pre-existing relationships between group members. Understanding which strategies are useful in specific collaborative contexts can help educators guide groups of students to effectively regulate their emotions.