Impact of emotions on students in teaching and learning

Abstract

Researches have shown that students experience a wide range of emotions in class and while doing test. The type of emotions students experiences in classroom environment and during learning has impact of their academic performance. If educationists can understand this, it will lead to better education planning. A lot of researches had investigated the effects of emotions on academic performance, learning strategies and motivation of students separately; however, none of them had studied these factors together in a single research. In terms of data collection, none of these researches had captured students’ emotions by ethnography as data were mainly collected through questionnaire in these studies. This research addresses these two shortcomings by investigating the types of emotions students experienced during class, while taking tests and after taking tests in relation to academic performance, learning strategies and motivation. The research when a step further from the usual data collection of distributing questionnaire by recording the class sessions and analysing the video clips with the participants to identify the emotions experienced by them while teaching was on-going. The aim of experiment relating to academic performance and test anxiety was to investigate the effect of achievement pressure and expectation of failure as contributors to students’ thought and action; to know if there is correlation between test anxiety and academic performance; and finally, to find out if there is correlation between class-related emotions and test-related emotions. Experiment relating to motivational beliefs was aimed at investigating the relationship between the components of motivational beliefs and test anxiety; effect of academic performance on motivational beliefs and test anxiety; and finally, relationship between students’ self-regulation, self-determination and academic performance. Experiment relating to boredom was aimed at finding the impact of boredom on students’ interest in the course and learning; impact of boredom on students understanding of the course and learning; and finally, how boredom affect students learning, attention during class and engagement in learning. This research used both qualitative and quantitative methods to gather data used in answering the research hypotheses raised from the research questions. The participants for the study were twenty-four (24) students of the Department of Computer Science, Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo, Nigeria. This research was conducted through teaching of two topics from Computer Science courses and a test for each of the class taught, distribution of questionnaire, and analysing the video clips from the class sessions. Learners’ academic performances were obtained through the tests conducted, while achievement pressure, expectation of failure, students’ thought, and action were obtained from Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ). Motivational beliefs components were obtained from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). Findings from this study revealed that students' motivation and action are settings to consider when investigating the different types of emotions students experience while in class and during test. The results also show that class-related emotions and test-related emotions have different emotional effect on students which support hypotheses for patterns within and between domains. Results from the research revealed that motivational beliefs are not correlated to test anxiety. The result of the study also revealed that there is high correlation between test anxiety and academic outcomes. This shows that students who have high test anxiety are likely to performance poorly in their examinations. Boredom was found to have significant impact on student’s interest and understanding of the course taught in class, and likewise on attention and engagement during lectures. The results of analysis of interview revealed that emotions experienced during teaching are related to individuals and learning styles and students’ personal affairs which are not related to happening in classroom environment.