‘It's all about balance’: exploring how engineering undergraduates and teachers regulate emotions in pursuit of group-based project goals

Abstract

Group-based projects offer opportunities in university engineering curricula to learn from important, yet under-recognised, emotional experiences and to develop emotion skills that are valuable for engineering study and professional practice. By applying a theoretical framework comprising goal-based theories and emotion regulation theories to two undergraduate case studies, this study illustrates how engineering teachers and their students learn to regulate emotions as they interact in pursuit of their goals. Qualitative data was collected via interviews with two teaching teams and from 80 of their students, using in-situ questionnaires. The paper presents four themes, giving insight into how participants navigated the complex and contradictory nature of interpersonal emotion regulation in these engineering education contexts. These included deploying varied strategies to achieve balance between uncertainty, independence, pressure, reward and multiple, conflicting goals. Recommendations are offered for equipping students and teachers to work with emotions inherent in group project-based learning, through more emotion-informed approaches.