Understanding and facilitating positive group dynamics in education

The project Understanding and facilitating positive group dynamics in education aims to increase our understanding of processes in underlying group dynamics in educational contexts, which will provide novel insights into the conditions under which positive peer group dynamics emerge and how they can be facilitated.

For this purpose, we integrate theories and methods from developmental and educational science, neuroscience, animal science, social network science, and computational science. We investigate whether children synchronize their behaviour during group activities and whether group synchronization predicts children’s subjective experiences and identification during social interactions. In addition, we focus on synchronization in children’s heart rate variability as a marker for shared emotional processes at the group level.

We will examine specific associations of these synchronization processes with changes in children’s social representation of their peer relationships, such as their friendships and peer group membership.