Get Back to Green: Understanding and improving education on the process of emotion regulation for students ages 5 to 7
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Date
2023-03
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Abstract
The current common core in Ohio includes Social Emotional Learning which sets out to teach students how to build successful relationships, feel empathy for others, and understand and manage their emotions. With the goal being to benefit children's mental health and good decision-making. In my research, I wanted to understand how difficult of a lesson this can be to teach young children, ages 5-7 years old. After interviewing several first and second-grade teachers, I learned that teaching such a heavy topic to young students can be a difficult task, especially with a lack of resources available to make the material engaging. Specifically, with students ages 5-7 years of age, teachers are trying to teach emotion regulation and coping mechanisms. I performed a co-design research session with a classroom of first-grade students to understand what was lacking in their education on this topic. While students were able to recognize the emotions they were feeling and knew what they should do to process them, they struggled with properly practicing the coping mechanisms they had learned. I decided to create a children's book, to be used primarily in a classroom setting, that not only showed the journey of a character facing and overcoming difficult emotions, but also showed the students how to properly exercise healthy coping mechanisms. These coping mechanisms in the storybook were brought to life as animations in augmented reality, for readers to follow along. This supplies students with a toolkit to be able to properly practice the coping mechanisms they are learning, in order for their education on this topic to be most effective. A digital version of this book was also developed as a resource for teachers, to display over projectors or smartboards, and practice with an entire classroom of students. I will be returning to the same classroom of first-grade students to conduct usability testing of the book and augmented reality features.
Description
Pediatrics and Family Health: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Denman Undergraduate Research Forum)
Keywords
Mental Health, Emotion Regulation, Education, Pediatric and Family Health