2009 First International Workshop on Education Technology and Computer Science
Academic Emotions and Its Teaching Strategies in CAI
Liu Haiyan *
Humanities & Economic Management School
China University of Geosciences
Beijing, China
e-mail: sd2lhy@163.com
Abstract—Based on data from 933 Chinese adolescents and
self-developed questionnaire of academic emotions, the
structure of adolescent’s academic emotions was examined.
Results showed that the adolescents often experience six kinds
of emotions in learning activities: boredom, fear, sadness,
happiness, anxiety and surprise. Taking fear and happiness as
example, we propose teaching strategies to reduce fear and
increase happiness in CAI.
Keywords-Academic Emotions; emotional teaching
Strategies; Computer Assistant Instruction(CAI)
I. EMOTION AND TEACHING DESIGN IN CAI
In recent years, with the new development of emotional
psychology and emotional intelligence, emotion in education
and teaching is becoming more and more important, and it
has been an important subject in educational psychology. A
large number of studies have shown that emotion plays
important roles in students' learning, the improvement of
ability and achievement, health keeping and personal growth
[1,2]. Except the studies of the test anxiety in 1970 and
emotional attribution in achievement situation, empirical
Studies about students’ emotional experience are relatively
weak, and these studies are few in Chinese background
except the research of DongYan & Yu Guoliang[3], which
are needed to be discussed urgently.
At present, multimedia technology is more and more
used in each teaching links, and it promotes the development
of optimizing classroom teaching and also improves teaching
quality. Multimedia technology makes teaching content vivid
and motivates students’ enthusiasm, interests and creativity.
Because teachers have finished the multimedia teaching
courseware in the spare time, and it saves the time of writing
and drawing, it may add the information and promote the
students’ learning efficiency; the multimedia teaching
courseware may realize resources sharing through internet,
and break the limits of time and space and enlarge the
students’ knowledge. However, multimedia teaching also has
disadvantages, which the foremost problem is giving too
much attention to learner's motivation and cognitive
process[4], while neglecting the emphasis of emotion. For
instance, teachers and students much depends on the
multimedia teaching courseware, and neglect the emotional
communication; multimedia teaching uses the courseware of
_____________________________________________________
∗
Corresponding author, female, doctor/professor, mainly researches on
motivation and emotion.
Tel: +86-10-82322134
978-0-7695-3557-9/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ETCS.2009.480
Yang Xianhua
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences China
Shangluo University
Shangluo, Shanxi, China
e-mail: emery10818@sina.com
stylization, and it is fast and has large quantity of
information, so students have no time to think, analyze and
store knowledge, and it may undermine the learning effect
seriously. Therefore, new trend of reform in educational
technology is that multimedia teaching pays much attention
to the emotional design.
In view of this, the present study was undertaken to
further explore: (1) which kinds of emotions do Chinese
students experience in learning activity? (2) On the basis of
(1), taking 1-2 academic emotions for example, we design
the emotional teaching strategies.
II. ACADEMIC EMOTIONAL TYPES
Academic emotions are all kinds of emotions that
students experience in classroom teaching, academic
learning, and test-related situations (e.g., enjoyment of
learning, pride of success, or test-related anxiety)[1]. In order
to investigate academic emotional types of Chinese students,
we have developed a questionnaire about Chinese
adolescent’s academic emotions. Specific steps are as
follows: (1) Madding adjective judgment tables of emotional
experience. First, we have found 1130 adjective words
directly linked to emotions in Modern Chinese Dictionary
and obtained 751 words after deleting repeated words in
meaning. Then, 38 postgraduates of Chinese major and 4
postgraduates of psychology major assessed these words to
find out best words to express students’ emotions, which
frequencies were more than 60% to answer “YES”, 206
these words were obtained to form adjective judgment tables
of emotional experience. (2) Selecting academic emotional
words. After 148 Undergraduate who have learned
psychology assessed those 206 words, deleting 106
synonymic and unfamiliar words and 13 non-academic
emotional words, 87 academic emotional words were
obtained. (3) Madding formal questionnaire of academic
emotions. Based on data from 404 Chinese adolescent in
urban and rural areas, all items were rated on a 4-piont
scale( =never, =sometimes, =often, =always), and 35
items were deleted by using frequency and item
analysis(correlation analysis and differentiation analysis );
using exploratory factor analysis(KMO=.935)to analyze 52
items in the following four criteria: h2<.25; loading<.38;
items<3; loading(more than 2 factors)>.38. In this way, 3
items were deleted. According to steep slope and theoretical
conception of 49 items, extracting 6 factors(interpretation
ratio>.30): sadness, fear, boredom, anxiety, happiness,
surprise, with which the interpretation ratio were respectively
13.774%, 9.744%, 7.944%, 6.486%, 5.272%, 5.120% and
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the total interpretation ratio was 48.340%. (4) Testing the
reliability and validity of academic emotions questionnaire.
Based on data from 360 Chinese adolescent in urban and
rural areas(325 valid subjects) to confirm the construction of
this questionnaire, confirm factor analysis showed that the
revised anastomosis degree is χ2/df=1.793, IFI=0.985,
TLI=0.983, CFI=0.985, RMSEA=0.049 (AMOS4.0); the
formal questionnaire was formed by 36 items when revised:
factor1=sadness(14 items); factor2=fear(5 items);
factor3=boredom(4 items); factor4=anxiety(4 items);
factor5=happiness(5 items); factor6=surprise (4 items). The
total α and each factor α of this questionnaire are
respectively 0.89, 0.85, 0.78, 0.83, 0.78, 0.72, 0.85, and its
retest reliability are respectively 0.93, 0.85, 0.72, 0.66, 0.75,
0.72, 0.82.
Using self-developed academic emotions questionnaire
with the sampling of 1,000 adolescents (933 valid subjects:
boys=441; girls=492; university students=225; senior high
school students=380; junior high school students=328), the
emotional types of Chinese adolescent were investigated. By
using repetitive measurement and analysis of variance to
compare the mean score of each emotional type, the results
showed that there are significant differences among these six
emotional types. That is, the intense of Chinese adolescent
academic emotions were orderly, from the most to the least,
as follows: boredom(3.52±.8), fear(3.06±.65), sad(2.85±.55),
happy(2.58±.55), anxious(2.02±.47), surprised(1.87±.48).
III. EMOTIONAL TEACHING STRATEGIES IN CAI
The present results showed that Chinese adolescents are
often experience six academic emotions: boredom, fear,
sadness, happiness, anxiety, and surprise, and different
academic emotions will influence learning activity in
different ways. Positive academic emotions (except relief)
correlate positively with meta-cognitive strategy, elaborate,
organized and critical thinking and it is helpful to flexible or
creative learning strategies, meta-cognitive regulation.
Negative academic emotions correlate negatively with
flexible learning strategy, but low correlations emerged in
some prior studies. Anger, anxiety and guilt correlate
positively with adoption of repeating strategies, that is,
students with negative emotions may use more strict
strategies, such as simple repeating strategies and algorithm
procedure. Too much relief and boredom will make students
inert in physiology and cognition, and it may cause students’
decreased concentration and easiness of information
processing[1].Test anxiety correlate negatively with meta-
cognitive strategy, that is, test anxiety may hinder meta-
cognitive activities[5].
Generally speaking, proper positive emotions are helpful
to motivate students’ learning motivation, improve students’
cognitive activities, promote students’ efficiency of
classroom learning, and form bilateral relationship between
teachers and students. Therefore, when teachers use teaching
strategies, positive emotions should be increased but
negative emotions reduced.
Fear is a negative emotional reaction aroused by
threatening or dangerous situations, while happiness is
positive affect when students dive into activities or fulfill
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their self-anticipation. These are two emotions directly
linked to students’ learning activities, so we will take these
two emotions for example to discuss the teaching strategies
of reducing fear but increasing happiness according to
FEASP model which it has proposed by Astleitner[6] and
Astleitner et al. [7].
A. Teaching Strategies of Reducing Fear
Tip1: Convincing success of learning. It is inevitable for
students to experience achievement situations (e.g., test or
contest), by which may experience failure, while failure
always associate with negative emotions, such as disgrace,
shame, low self-esteem, or no self-confidence. Therefore,
students are afraid of failure most. It means that failure
should be furthest reduced in the design of multimedia
teaching. In order to avoid failure, teaching strategies can be
used, such as giving feedback in time, designing pre-
organizer, supplying self-check practice, moderating
progress, reducing task difficulty, and decreasing teaching
materials.
Tip2: Regarding mistakes as the learning opportunities. It
is inevitable for students to experience failure and make
mistakes in learning activities; however, if students correct
their mistakes in time, they will have valuable learning
opportunities. Thus, all kinds of the potential mistakes
should be listed as a table, corrected with right answer, or
avoided by using specific methods (e.g., contrasting audio
and visual effects, outstanding key features) which will
attract students’ attention in the design of CAI.
Tip3: Creating relaxed learning environment. Learning is
not a easy activity, in which students will experience more
fear and insecurity, thus, some relaxing training programs
should be designed in CAI, for instance, the relaxing
background music, light music, humorous stories, or some
other delighted literal materials or activities.
B. Teaching Strategies of Increasing Happiness
Tip1: Offering an Opportunity of open learning.
Exploring the information and controlling the learning
environment freely is very important to increase happiness.
In the learning process, learning will be very interesting if
students can learn the content of their choice, decide to study
the process themselves and explore knowledge freely. Thus,
an open environment of learning should be created in CAI.
As for teaching skills of educational technology, an open
learning means to establish the distance learning-based
virtual classroom [7]. The virtual classroom can be created
via network, e-mail and video-assisted. The virtual
classroom can offer teaching contents, curriculum plan and
organization, completing performance evaluation and
feedback via e-mail transmission. Therefore, it will increase
students’ happiness by teachers’ unstructured guidance and
exploring knowledge freely.
Tip2: Making use of humor. The best way to be happy is
to be humorous. And multimedia teaching is the best media
to make humor. Thus, packages of producing stories,
animation or cartoons should be increased in CAI design.
Some procedures can create a comic scene of daily life with
humor, for instance, students can choose many heroic figures
to complete different lines of actions and ideas; it can also
create a scene for students to make cartoons without any
help, such as choosing different facial expressions, gestures
and language to describe different characters and their state
of mind [8].
Tip3: Setting up “Teaching game”. One of the happiest
activities in human life is playing games. In order to increase
happiness in teaching, “teaching games”, which are selected
from market, such as games of virtual world, games of role
playing and adventure games according with the
characteristics of different disciplines, should be designed in
CAI to arouse students’ learning interests and reinforce their
learning process.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
1. Chinese adolescents often experience 6 kinds of
emotions in learning activities: boredom, fear, sadness,
happiness, anxiety and surprise.
2. Teaching strategies of reducing fear were convincing
success of learning, regarding mistakes as the learning
opportunities and creating relaxed learning environment.
3. Teaching strategies of increasing happiness were
offering an opportunity of open learning, making use of
humor and setting up “teaching game”.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research has been supported by the Science
Foundation of China University of Geosciences(No.
200714).
REFERENCES
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[2] Meyer, D.K., & Turner, J. C., “Discovering emotion in classroom
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[3] Dong Yan, and Yu Guoliang, “The Development and Application of
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[4] Reigeluth, C. M., “Instructional theory, practitioner needs, and new
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[5] Wang Ling, and Guo Dejun, “Study on the relation of metacognitive
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[6] Astleitner, H., “Designing emotionally sound instruction: The FEASP
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[8] Shapiro, L. E., How to raise a child with a high EQ. New York:
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