Emotional and Cognitive Affordances of Collaborative Learning Environments

Abstract

Collaborative learning involves intricate interactions in which students participate in cognitive activities within social-emotional environments. Cognitive interactions mediate knowledge sharing, construction, and creation, while social-emotional interactions shape student perception of community climate and influence their emotional expressions, which, in turn, have a significant impact on their cognitive interactions. Although research has consistently found that social presence and student-student interaction has a positive influence on students' learning through emotional engagement, subject-based teaching remained largely more of cognitive activities. Teachers tend to treat lessons that heightened social-emotional aspects separate from subject-based lessons. This symposium brings together an international group of scholars to present recent studies on emotion and cognition in collaborative learning environments. Methods, such as self-report, video observation, affective state detection using FACET, and machine learning models, were adopted to investigate students' emotions. The results collectively suggest that these methods indeed served to uncover students' emotions; emotions such as joy/enjoyment/happiness, confidence, and surprise were associated with students' knowledge building progress; and that students' online interactions had a high impact on the emotional and linguistic tone of learners. The symposium aims to discuss the theoretical, practical and policy implications of these studies on collaborative learning.