The Influence of Academic Emotions on Learning Effects: A Systematic Review.

Jing Tan,Jie Mao,Ming Gao,Yizhang Jiang

doi:10.3390/ijerph18189678

Abstract

Academic emotions can have different influences on learning effects, but these have not been systematically studied. In this paper, we objectively evaluate the influence of various academic emotions on learning effects and studied the relationship between positive and negative academic emotions and learning effects by using five electronic databases, including WOS, EMBASE, PubMed, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar. According to established standards, a total of 14 articles from 506 articles were included in the analysis. We divided the 14 studies into nine intervention studies and five observational studies; five of the nine intervention studies found that students who used active learning materials performed better and had higher mental loads than those who used neutral learning materials. Positive academic emotions promoted the learning effect. Four of the five observational studies with high school, college, and postgraduate participants reported that regulating academic emotions can improve learning effects. In conclusion, this paper holds that positive academic emotions are better than negative academic emotions at improving academic performance. In future research, a new method combining multichannel video observation, physiological data, and facial expression data is proposed to capture learners’ learning behavior in various learning environments.

Highlights

Three of the nine intervention studies [52,53,54] were conducted on middle school students in an online learning environment, and the results consistently showed that students improved their learning effects in terms of intervention conditions that promoted their own positive academic emotions
Compared with negative academic emotions, existing evidence tends to support the notion that positive academic emotions may have more of an effect on certain aspects of learning effects, because of environmental and intervention conditions, and how learning materials and measuring tools are used to assess learning effects in specific areas, it is too early to come to any firm conclusions
We focused on the effects of different learning environments that produced positive and negative academic emotions under different intervention conditions on aspects related to learning effects

Summary

Introduction

Academic emotional valence refers to whether the stimulus is pleasant or unpleasant, while academic emotional arousal describes the academic emotional intensity that a stimulus can cause [2]. Based on this classification, emotions can be divided into four groups [3]: positive arousal emotions (e.g., enjoyment, pride), positive emotions (e.g., relaxation), passive arousal emotions (e.g., anger, anxiety), and negative emotions (e.g., extreme depression, despair). Academic emotions are considered to be a key factor affecting learning [1], and a lot of studies have shown that positive academic moods experienced by learners are capable of promoting learning [1,3]. Studies on the role of multimedia learning have shown that inducing positive academic emotions can accelerate learning [4,5,6]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion