Emotional performance on physics and chemistry learning: the case of Spanish K-9 and K-10 students

ABSTRACT

We studied the emotions experienced by students during the last two years of compulsory secondary education (15 and 16 years old) when learning physics and chemistry. The objective of this piece of research was to establish different relationship between emotions felt by students and variables like the didactic methodology or the kind of science they are learning. We have collected data from different subject blocks such as those related to matter, energy and electricity or kinematics and dynamics, and they were processed and analysed in order to establish relationships by courses. The sample comprised 282 students. The results revealed that pupils mainly experience more positive emotions towards the content of chemistry than towards that of physics. There is also a decrease in the mean frequency of positive emotions such as joy as they pass from K-9 to K-10, and an increase in negative emotions such as boredom. The pupils who experienced positive emotions towards chemistry content related these to how the teacher taught the subject, rather than to the content itself. Negative emotions towards physics contents were linked to the exclusive use of the textbook, solving physics problems, or giving oral presentations.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• pupils
• secondary education
• physics and chemistry
• content
• course
• teacher

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the research projects EDU2016-77007-R (AEI/ERDF, EU), and research project GR18004.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Affects and emotions are not the same thing and psycological literature usually defines them in a different way. We follow the canonical definition made by Shouse:

‘Although feeling and affect are routinely used interchangeably, it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions. As Brian Massumi’s definition of affect in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal’ (Shouse, 2005). In the current work, we will talk about everything not included in the cognitive sphere, so these are subject of emotional and affective domain.

2 “Causality.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/causality. Accessed 18 June 2020.

3 Although an in-depth study of the motivational aspects of this emotional performance should be hard and difficult to carry out, we have chosen a preliminary and simple approach, just for categorize those reasons related to the internal mood disposition of the student.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the research projects EDU2016-77007-R (AEI/ERDF, EU), and research project GR18004.