Emotion matters for academic success: Implications of the Article by Jarrell, Harley, Lajoie, and Naismith (2017) for creating nurturing and supportive learning environments to help students manage their emotions.

Abstract

This paper is in response to the published article entitled “Success, failure and emotions: examining the relationship between performance feedback and emotions in diagnostic reasoning” (Jarrell, Harley, Lajoie, & Naismith, Education Technology & Research Development, 65, 1263–1284: 2017) focusing on its implications to inform educational practice and research as learning and instruction are shifted to digital environments in times of emergencies and crisis. The study explored the relationships between learners’ retrospective performance outcome emotions and their academic performance (i.e., efficiency and accuracy). The results revealed that positive emotions were associated with higher performance while negative emotions were associated with poorer performance, and the low intensity emotions were associated with performance between high and low levels. A summary of the study reported by the article is provided, including the purpose, methods, measures, data analysis and findings. Following the summary, the paper focuses on the discussion about the focused perspective, values and impact of the study on digital learning environments with implications for education during the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergency situations. Based on Jarrell and her colleagues’ study, suggestions are made for designing and developing instructional strategies to support students with negative or low intensity emotions and for creating learning environments to cultivate positive emotions. This paper concludes with recommendations for future research.