Measuring, exploring and enhancing undergraduate students’ emotional engagement with physics

Abstract

Students’ emotional engagement, which is important for their continued interest in the subject, is under researched. My thesis rests on two pillars; measuring emotions and creating research-based ‘colorful historical stories’ in order to encourage emotional engagement.

I have adapted the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) to measure the emotions of students undertaking first year physics studies. The measured emotions are pride, enjoyment, anger, anxiety, hopelessness, and boredom. I adapted the AEQ to measure emotions in the laboratories (AEQ-PhysicsPrac) and whole courses (AEQ-Physics). I used SPSS software, conducted exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

‘Colorful historical stories’ were crafted for both the laboratory and the lecture components of the course, with different styles being used. Stories were ‘presented’ without intruding into the content being taught. I demonstrated that the use of the stories influences students’ emotional engagement.

During the study, the effect of the different teaching modes, face-to-face, blended and entirely online delivery modes were investigated. I found that students engaged more positively in face-to-face mode of teaching than in blended and online mode during the pandemic. During the pandemic students’ positive emotions about the course were reduced.

The study shows the utility of the adapted AEQ in physics, where it can be used to differentiate emotion profiles for different factors including introductory story context, different courses and mode of studies. It also shows that colorful stories, containing historical anecdotes, engage students emotionally while stimulating their interest and so can be inserted in students’ learning materials to influence their emotional engagement.