Students' emotion regulation when learning online

The purpose of this project is to explore students’ emotion regulation practices while studying online. Specifically, this study will investigate how and why students manage their own emotions, as well as examine whether they try to influence their peers' emotions in these learning settings. Furthermore, the project will investigate how the online learning environment, including the spaces where students interact in online communities and peer support networks, impacts students’ emotion regulation. 

Ultimately, it is hoped that this project will help identify ways in which students’ emotions and emotion regulation can be further supported when studying online. 

This project has four primary research questions. These are:

1. How and why do students regulate their own emotions when learning online?

2. How and why do students regulate the emotions of other students in these settings? 

3. How does the online environment (including the spaces where students interact, such as forums or social media) influence students’ emotion regulation practices? 

4. What can be done to further support students’ emotion regulation when learning online?

Because of the scarce research investigating students’ emotion regulation in online learning settings, this study will take an exploratory approach. Exploratory research aims to shed light onto topics that are not well understood (Punch, 2014). To do this, an online survey will be used to explore the views of a diverse range of students studying in the STEM faculty.

It is hoped that this project will form phase one of a multi-phase investigation. In the next phase, to be submitted as part of the January 2025 eSTEeM call, we aim to use the findings from our current project to inform the development and implementation of specific interventions. We will also evaluate the effects of these interventions on student emotions and wellbeing. This next phase will employ a collaborative methodology, involving students and university staff as active collaborators in the project (Jones, 2023).