We should be teaching students emotion regulation strategies, and not just in primary school.
Beaumont et al. (2023) present promising evidence that secondary students would benefit from cognitive reappraisal strategy instruction.
When I was in primary school, one of my teachers would have us compete in timed multiplication table tests each day, and list the "best performers” in a chart at the front of the class. With the benefit of hindsight and an education in the psychology of learning, I know now that this was not a great instructional strategy (e.g., concerns about activating performance goal orientations, anxiety, etc). But, I have to say, when I was a kid, at first I really loved those tests. I enjoyed math and had memorized my “times tables” well, so I saw the tests as a chance to “flex my math muscle.” And, therefore, I was usually first or second on the chart, eliciting some praise from my peers. But, after a week or two, I began to worry that I wouldn’t stay at the top of the chart, and I began dreading the tests. Sure enough, I began to do worse on them - I had lost my mojo. Thankfully, my mother helped me get my mojo back by encouraging me to think about them as fun opportunities to flex my “math muscle” again, and make it stronger. That cognitive reappraisal was really helpful for my performance and my mental health in school.
Welp, Beaumont and colleagues (2023) have done a pretty rigorous, longitudinal study of the relationship between cognitive reappraisal (an emotion regulation strategy) and subjective reports of school well-being, and they found my mom was right to help me reframe my anxiety (no surprise there). Productive cognitive reappraisals (e.g., “This test isn’t a threat, it’s a chance for me to assess my progress and see what else I need to learn”) positively predicted subjective school well-being, which in turn predicted more cognitive reappraisals, etc. It’s a virtuous cycle! Now, of course, there are limitations to the study (e.g., all self-report data, no academic performance measure) but the authors did a lot of strong “mechanical” work (e.g., solid design, testing for measurement invariance, trying different models and getting similar findings), which makes me think they are on to something.
And their study was done with secondary school students, suggesting that productive emotion regulation skills are important throughout schooling. Such skills are often explicit learning outcomes in elementary school (and in my house), but perhaps they should also be taught and fostered in secondary school, too. Goodness knows the emotions don’t get easier to manage in high school.