This study focuses on motivation and emotions in collaborative learning. The aim is to investigatethe kinds of socio-emotional challenges learners experience during learning processes, and toexamine how motivation and emotions are regulated during challenging situations, in order todevelop appropriate methods of identifying socially shared regulation of emotions from situated,real life data.
The study includes the development and implementation of an instrument that collects dataregarding learners’ situation-specific interpretations of their socio-emotional experiences, as wellas analyses of the data derived from two different data collections. The first empirical data set iscomposed of elementary school students’ interviews and video-observations. The second data setincludes higher education students’ self-reports, video-observations, and interviews. The analysescombine different data sources and qualitative and descriptive quantitative methods in order tocreate a comprehensive understanding of the regulation of motivation and emotions incollaborative learning situations.
A lack of instruments that gather data of learners’ situation-specific, real-life experiences hasbeen evident in motivation and self-regulated learning research, where static, general self-reportmeasures have been dominant. In this study, the results from the first empirical data collection areimplemented in the development of an AIRE (Adaptive Instrument for Regulation of Emotions)instrument. The AIRE collects situation-specific data dealing with learners. experienced socio-emotional challenges and their regulation within a group. The second empirical data collection ofthis study employs the AIRE instrument as a method.
In social learning situations, learners’ can experience a variety of emotions that influencelearning. The results of this study show that students can regulate their emotions in order tomaintain a goal-oriented learning process. Furthermore, the results indicate that group memberscan regulate emotions and motivation together within the group. This socially shared regulation isdistinct from self-regulation as well as from co-regulation, where development of self-regulationis supported by others, or where group members regulate their own learning processes in parallelwith each other.
