Index
23 September 2010
Emotions a factor in learning and teaching
Dr Christopher White.
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Understanding students' emotion can provide insights into the learning and teaching experience above and beyond current evaluative measures.
That's the finding from research undertaken by Dr Christopher White from the School of Finance, Economics and Marketing at RMIT University.
"Emotions play a central role in forming satisfaction judgements and influencing word-of-mouth communication in a higher education context," Dr White said.
"My findings indicated that emotions associated with learning and teaching can be conceptualised as three dimensions that contain 14 positive and negative emotions.
"The first dimension consists of emotions such as happy, enjoyment and hopeful, the second, labelled here as external negative, includes angry, disappointed and frustrated, and the third called internal negative involves scared, stressed and worried."
Dr White said the notion that emotions influenced intentions and behaviour had a long history in philosophical and social science thought.
Over the past 10 years, research into the way emotions influence customer evaluations and judgements of goods and services had proliferated in the marketing literature.
The evidence indicated that emotions played a significant role in forming satisfaction judgements and ultimately a consumer's propensity to say positive things about their experience to others.
"Despite this understanding, firms have been slow to incorporate emotions into their consumer feedback questionaries and the evaluation of learning and teaching in universities is no exception," he said.
"The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ), an annual survey of graduate attitudes towards their courses, assesses areas that include perceptions of teaching quality and generic skill development.
"This level of analysis is obviously important but could be enhanced by questions that explore the emotions related to a learning and teaching experience and the way these emotions impact on satisfaction evaluations and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
"My findings are that, consistent with research on emotions in other industries, higher levels of positive emotions among students were significantly associated with higher levels of satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth referrals while high levels of negative emotions had the inverse effect.
"Certain types of negative emotions were additionally responsible for reducing evaluations of teaching and learning quality."
Dr White said the reasons why students attended university also influenced their emotional and quality evaluations.
"Those studying for intrinsic reasons such as 'wanted a challenge' or 'like discovering new things' experience significantly higher levels of positive emotions, perceptions of quality and satisfaction than those who were there for extrinsic reasons or because they 'had to' or were 'told to'.
"Feelings of stress, worry, etc, significantly heightened feelings of frustration, anger and disappointment, although this particular pattern was observed only among those who were motivated to study for extrinsic reasons.
"Research has shown that extrinsically motivated students do not perform to the same academic standards as those who are intrinsically motivated and anxiety associated with the ability to perform may account for elevated levels of stress and worry."
