Stimulating positive emotional experiences in mathematics learning: influence of situational and personal factors

Abstract

PostprintThis is the accepted version of a paper published in European Journal of Psychology of Education. This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination. The study aims to assess the relative importance of a large number of variables for predicting students' positive activating emotions during mathematics learning. Participants were 668 firstyear upper secondary school students from 33 schools of different sizes and locations. Two questionnaires were distributed, one assessing students' perceptions and beliefs about their learning situation in mathematics in general, and the other assessing the characteristics of a particular mathematics lesson and the students' emotional experiences during this lesson. Singleconstruct and multivariate models for predicting students' emotions were computed. The results show that the multivariate models were the most efficient, predicting as much as 59% of the variance in students' emotional experiences. The two most important constructs were students' type of motivation and perceived degree of learning, which together predicted 48% of the students' emotions. Single-construct models predicted, at most, 36%. The relative and absolute predictive ability of different motivational constructs are reported. The relationships between constructs and their implications for teaching are discussed.

Challenging the Universality of Achievement Goal Models: A Comparison of Two Culturally Distinct Countries

“…That the two-goal model was found to be most appropriate for the Swedish sample is in accordance with our previous studies on Swedish students, using partially different instruments and in different cohorts (Grades 5-12, sample size varying between 600 and 5600; Palm, Sullivan Hellgren, & Winberg, 2010;Winberg et al, 2014;Winberg & Palm, 2016). In addition, a recent thesis by Blomgren (2016), to our knowledge the only other Swedish study examining the factor structure of achievement goals, reports the same problem with separating Swedish students' PAp and PAv goals.…”

“…MAp goals have been shown to correlate positively with interest (Church, Elliot, & Gable, 2001), use of productive learning strategies (Wolters, 2004), positive emotions (Winberg, Hellgren, & Palm, 2014), and high effort (Wolters, 2004). PAv goals show overall unfavorable patterns of outcomes (Church et al, 2001;Elliot & Church, 1997;Elliot & McGregor, 2001;Wolters, 2004), whereas the results for PAp goals are more mixed.…”

The Dampening Effects of Perceived Teacher Enthusiasm on Class-Related Boredom: The Mediating Role of Perceived Autonomy Support and Task Value

“…A high level of perceived teacher enthusiasm and autonomy support further improves college students’ perceived task value in class-related learning, which eventually results in lower class-related boredom and other positive learning outcomes. As situational factors, teacher enthusiasm and autonomy support were found to be important predictors of class-related boredom, considering the reciprocal relationship between positive and negative emotions ( Cacioppo and Berntson, 1994 ; Schimmack, 2001 ; Smith et al, 2006 ; Schimmack and Colcombe, 2007 ), which is aligned with the research results of Winberg et al (2014) on positive emotions. Our results also showed that perceived autonomy support and perceived task value fully mediated the relationship between perceived teacher enthusiasm on class-related boredom as serial and parallel inductors, which suggests the importance of the two mediators in this process.…”

Emotions and motivation in mathematics education: theoretical considerations and empirical contributions

“…One contribution in this special issue reports that students' interest differed between problems with a connection to reality ("dressed up" word problems and modelling problems) and problems without a connection to reality (intra-mathematical problems) when controlling for task difficulty (Rellensmann and Schukajlow 2017). As students' emotions such as enjoyment and boredom are related to their interest (Pekrun et al 2011;Tulis and Ainley 2011;Schukajlow and Rakoczy 2016;Winberg et al 2014), similar differences can also be expected for students' emotions. Taken together, we argue that task contents and domains should be considered to a greater extent in research on emotions and motivation in education, as emotions and motivation have been shown to be content-specific (Rakoczy 2008; and domain-specific (Goetz et al 2007).…”