Weaving Logic and Feeling: Emotions in Children's Mathematics Learning

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the centrality of emotion in students’ learning and wellbeing, specifically focusing on mathematics learning and assessment in primary schools, where students may experience stress and anxiety, even in the early stages of schooling. The multifaceted role that emotion plays in children’s development in the multiple processes of schooling is well acknowledged, and so is the role of assessment in learning. However, there is only scant literature on how primary students emotionally experience assessment in the learning process, particularly when receiving error feedback, and how this might lead to stress and anxiety, especially maths anxiety and how that might impact their wellbeing. In attempting to fill this gap in the literature, this study examined the core role that error feedback plays in learning and assessment, focusing on primary school mathematics. This study was conducted against a backdrop that increasingly recognises much current thinking about the nature of emotion and the relationship between emotion and cognition is problematic, when viewed through the lens of recent complexity science and brain science that views the brain not as cognitivist information processor but rather as a Bayesian predictor, in which error feedback is not simply a pedagogical tool but is central to how the brain functions. This thesis critically scrutinises conventional approaches and accounts of emotion and thinking and considers how understanding the brain as a highly complex, predictive, self-organising system, controlled by interoceptive (sensory) feedback loops, offers education a holistic, unified, embodied model of brain functioning that contrasts with much conventional theory. Specifically, this study investigates the temporal brain dynamics that result from the experience of failure and how these might the be modulated by carefully designed feedback and priming, such that it reduces visceral stress and anxiety and affords new learning.