Getting Emotional About Learning

DR FABIO D’AGOSTIN, REPORTING AND ANALYTICS COORDINATOR

When it comes to classrooms, student emotions tend to get bad press. Purely academic considerations are usually dominant, and emotions are commonly viewed as incidental to learning. This perspective often characterises subjects as solely cognitive pursuits with no need or room for emotions. Such a view runs counter to widely held concepts of human nature. Humans rarely, if ever, function in the absence of feelings.

Student emotional responses occur in all classrooms and are integral to the development of wellbeing. Emotions also serve to inform beliefs, attitudes and self-evaluations related to learning. As significantly, emotional states influence academic performance. Rather than denial or avoidance, we can improve our teaching practices by understanding how emotions arise in relation to learning and how feelings can be managed to improve academic outcomes.

This is no easy task. Human emotions defy simple identification, despite the neat psychometric categorisations and evaluations used by psychologists. In all classrooms, the emotional qualities of happiness, sadness, interest, fear, confusion, excitement and boredom can be experienced within a group of students during the same activity. Each of these emotions is different for every individual who experiences it.

The same quality of emotion can sometimes be helpful to learning and sometimes not. Student confusion is a good example. In its best form, confusion can trigger intrigue and spur a student to greater feats of perseverance and problem-solving. At worst, confusion may be a brick wall that completely ends progress.

Emotional responses may be related to a diverse variety of sources, adding nuance and uniqueness to every experience. Students can be predisposed to certain feelings, increasing their frequency of occurrence. Moods, or long-lasting feelings with no obvious point of reference, are not uncommon. Emotions can arise autonomously, like reflexes, or be experienced in conjunction with cognitive deliberations.

Emotional phenomena can be associated with social factors, such as occuring through group interactions or through linkages to power relationships. Feelings can also be shaped by the need to affiliate with a dominant peer culture as in a boy hating mathematics because all his friends don’t like it.

Displays of emotion are sometimes communicative performances, allowing individual expression of attitudes or beliefs. Boredom can arise simply because a student is in a mathematics classroom, regardless of the activity. It may be important for that individual to let their teacher know that they dislike mathematics. Similarly, students wishing to project positivity about mathematics may display emotions including interest and happiness independently of classroom events.

Possible sources of reference for student emotions also include physiological states. Sets of emotional responses can be associated with internal states including hunger, tiredness and sickness or pain. These tend to be negative and include feelings such as impatience, irascibility, boredom and anger. Any teacher will attest to the impacts of such states on academic behaviours.

Despite the complexity and often amorphous nature of emotions, teachers can help foster responses that enhance learning.

presented by tasks. When demands fell within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, academic challenge arose, another significant task property in fostering positive emotions.

My research also explored the variations in emotional appeal between traditional and unconventional approaches towards teaching. Generally, students were presented with a greater range of opportunities to experience enjoyment, interest and satisfaction during activities that did not involve explicit instruction or skills practice. Such activities featured studentcenteredness, open-ended solution spaces, scope for collaboration, personal meaningfulness, game-like investigations and other progressive properties.

Generally, students were presented with a greater range of opportunities to experience enjoyment, interest and satisfaction during activities that did not involve explicit instruction or skills practice.

My PhD research, conducted in a secondary setting, demonstrated that mathematical activities can be designed and implemented to elicit individual emotions including happiness, interest, enjoyment and excitement. These responses were usually coupled with valuable academic behaviours and dispositions such as engagement, curiosity, perseverance, determination and creativity, demonstrating a noncognitive dimension to states of learning.

The strongest associations between mathematical activities and positive emotions lay with task accessibility. Students needed to be able to achieve success, requiring careful consideration of the balance between existing student ability and the levels of academic demand

Perhaps the most valuable message to emerge from my study was the need for teachers to read students’ emotional responses in relation to academic activities. Not coincidentally, the same set of qualities that form a cornerstone of wellbeing and relationship-building is essential for the effective management of student feelings.

A teacher’s empathy, understanding, care and sensitivity are key attributes in discerning those emotional responses that can be influenced through their own teaching. The building of such skills and awareness can help a teacher leverage a powerful form of student affect. Students who are emotionally invested in their learning are arguably the greatest asset that any teacher can have in their classroom.

For further detail, my thesis can be accessed online at: bit.ly/TGCemotions