Analyzing how emotion awareness influences students' motivation, engagement, self-regulation and learning outcome

Abstract

Considering social and emotional competence in learning, emotion awareness aims to detect the emotions that students show during their learning interactions and make these emotions explicit to them. Being aware of their emotions, students become more conscious of their situation, what may prompt them to behavioral change. The main goal of this work is to analyze the effects of emotion awareness, supported by specific teaching strategies, on students’ motivation, engagement, self-regulation and learning outcome in long-term blended collaborative learning practices. A bilateral goal also involves an initial study that explores the way emotion awareness affects teacher’s attitude and feedback as well as the competencies that teachers need to have in order to achieve a positive change on students’ affective and cognitive state. To this end a quasi-experimental study was designed with high school students. The results of this study show that when students are aware of their emotions and guided by specific teaching strategies, their learning performance improves in relation to their motivation, engagement and self-regulation. Likewise, when teachers are conscious of students’ emotional state their attitude and feedback become more effective and timely.