Key Findings from Readings

At the beginning of ARP, I focussed on reading about mood in the classroom and how it can impact learning. I discovered a questionnaire that was developed to measure mood in the classroom and to assess whether it has an impact on attainment. The Achievement Emotions Questionnaire is a comprehensive set of scales used to “measure students’ multiple achievement emotions” (Pekrun et al, 2011). The study found that achievement emotions are linked to “motivation, strategies, self-regulation and performance” (Pekrun et al. 2011). While the questionnaire has been a developed through comprehensive study, when I showed it to the students, Student 6 said they found it “a clinical and emotionless way to measure emotions”. The students felt that their mood in class was too complex and varied to be measured in any way that would be useful to their learning.

Stone & Thompson, 2014, p.312 cited in Canovi et al, 2019 suggest that “to capture mood, researchers must develop methods that go beyond descriptions of individuals’ emotional states and are able to describe the collective emotional experience in terms of ‘a dialectical and mutually constitutive relation between individual and social context.” This was echoed in the primary research; students spoke about how nuanced moments in class could alter their mood and how the interaction with teachers and peers could have a big impact on their mood. Student 1 said, “a lot of us don’t really know each other that well. And I feel like that’s where a lot of anxiety happens and like because like if I don’t know someone, just by looking at them I won’t know if they are feeling the same way I am.”

This suggests that ‘mood’ in the classroom is co-constructed. Christopher M. Bache (2008) discusses how the classroom becomes a space for collective consciousness and that this is when the best teaching and learning occurs. “I came to see that the circle of learning between student and teacher is a flow that has no clearly defined beginning. My students’ desire to understand and my capacity to articulate were two sides of a synaptic bridge in a larger mind, and only when we came together and combined our resources did we fulfil our respective roles in this larger dance.” The students referred to this relationship with their tutors a lot, with Student 6 saying, “I think it goes two ways with emotions in classrooms.” They felt that ‘humanising’ the lecturer was key to enable them to feel more comfortable to learn. Student 9 said, “I think also seeing that, like, your lecturers make mistakes… it humanises somebody.” Student 4 said “I think being friendly and having some kind of some kind of rapport with people… it does change the whole attitude of the class.”

Bache, C.M (2008) The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness. State University of NY Press: Albany.

Canovi, A. G., Rajala, A., Kumpulainen, K., & Molinari, L. (2019). The Dynamics of Class Mood and Student Agency in Classroom Interactions. The Journal of Classroom Interaction, 54(1), 4–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45442287

Pekrun, R., Goetz, T., Frenzel, A.C., Barchfeld, P., Perry, R.P. (2011) Measuring emotions in students’ learning and performance: The Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ), Contemporary Educational Psychology, 36:1, pp. 36-48 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2010.10.002.