Research 2

Source
http://www.education.com/reference/article/student-emotions/

My topic
How do the students' emotion affect the lesson and how can we use them properly in class? 

What I hope to learn from this source:
Are student emotions important for academic learning and performance? Do student emotions affect the class?



Notes

IMPORTANCE OF STUDENT EMOTIONS FOR ACADEMIC LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE

Two lines of evidence suggest that students' emotions profoundly affect their learning and performance. The first line of evidence originates in experimental mood research, the second in situated field studies directly analyzing students' emotions. Experimental mood research has shown that mood and emotions facilitate mood-congruent memory processes, such that positive self-related information is more easily stored and retrieved when in a positive mood and negative information when in a negative mood (e.g., Olafson & Ferraro, 2001). By implication, a positive mood can enhance students' motivation to approach learning tasks, whereas a negative mood can trigger mood-congruent avoidance motivation. Furthermore, the findings indicate that positive versus negative mood can promote different styles of information processing. Whereas creative, flexible, and holistic ways of thinking are facilitated by a positive mood, more analytical, rigid, and detailed ways of processing of information can be enhanced by a negative mood (Lewis & Haviland-Jones, 2000).

The ecological validity of these experimental findings, however, may be limited due to differences between the laboratory and real-life classroom situations, including ethical constraints preventing an induction of more intense emotions in the laboratory. Therefore, field studies have directly addressed the effects of students' emotions as experienced in classroom situations. Most of these studies focused on students' test anxiety (summaries in Zeidner, 1998, 2007). Research on test anxiety has shown that anxiety impairs performance on complex or difficult tasks that demand cognitive resources (e.g., difficult mathematical tasks). Performance on easy and less complex tasks is not impaired or enhanced. Interference and attentional deficit models have been proposed to explain negative performance effects of anxiety. These models assume that anxiety involves task-irrelevant thinking which reduces task-related attention thus interfers with performance on tasks requiring attentional resources: Students who worry about possible failure cannot focus their attention on learning.

In line with findings on task-related effects, test anxiety correlates negatively with students' academic achievement, typically explaining about 10% of the variance in achievement scores (Hembree, 1988). However, these correlations should be interpreted cautiously. First, they may be due to effects of failure on the development of students' anxiety, rather than effects of anxiety on achievement. Second, correlations were not uniformly negative across studies and individuals. Zero and positive relationships were found as well. One reason may be the ambiguous motivational effects which anxiety can exert: Anxiety reduces students' interest and intrinsic motivation, but it can also motivate students to invest extra effort to avoid failure. In individual cases, these motivating effects can be so strong that negative effects on attention and intrinsic motivation are compensated. From an educator's perspective, however, any positive effect of anxiety in an individual student is certainly outweighed by the negative effect on subject-matter interest and academic performance in the majority of students.

The available evidence for effects of student emotions other than anxiety is limited. For positive emotions such as enjoyment of learning, positive correlations with academic achievement have been reported (Pekrun et al., 2002). For anger and shame, findings suggest that overall relationships with students' achievement are negative. As with anxiety, however, the effects need not uniformly be negative. For example, in students who believe in their capabilities, shame about failure on an exam can fuel motivation to invest more effort in the future (Turner & Schallert, 2001). In contrast, findings on boredom and hopelessness suggest that these two emotions are just detrimental by exerting negative effects on cognitive resources, motivation, information processing, and any kind of academic performance (Pekrun et al., 2002).

In sum, the available evidence implies that it would be inappropriate to assume that positive emotions always exert positive effects and negative emotions always negative effects. Rather, the effects depend on the mediating processes and specific task demands under consideration. More specifically, positive activating emotions such as enjoyment of learning likely are beneficial for students' learning and performance under most task conditions. Conversely, negative deactivating emotions such as hopelessness and boredom can be assumed to be devastative to any kind of academic performance. The effects of positive deactivating emotions such as relief and relaxation, however, probably are more ambiguous. Similarly, negative activating emotions such as anxiety, shame, and anger can exert ambiguous effects by reducing attention and interest, but also by being able to strengthen extrinsic motivation as well as more rigid modes of information processing such as simple rehearsal of learning material. Therefore, negative activating emotions can enhance performance in specific cases, although their average affects across students are negative.

Final Thoughts
The part which is affected by emotion is different according  to the emotion type. So, I can guess that it is important not to overlook the influence of negative emotion because it also play a role in learning.