Year: 2021
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Emotions significantly impact classroom experiences, as emotions can shape a student’s academic self-concept and achievement. In the early elementary years, learning to read is a highly salient objective for students. As a result, reading can elicit strong emotions that influence students’ enjoyment and perceived efficacy in reading. Previous research in reading has overlooked the effects of emotions. The majority of emotion research has focused on adolescent and undergraduate students and overlooked students in the early elementary years. The impact of emotions on students learning to read (i.e., emerging readers) has not been extensively studied. The work presented within this dissertation attempted to address this gap in the literature by examining how emotions affect scores on two different literacy tasks in a sample of emerging readers. In three separate studies, a computer-generated automatic facial expression coding software was used to measure individual emotions such as joy, anger, confusion and frustration. The first study examined students’ emotional reactions during a word recognition task and whether they affect word recognition scores. The results demonstrated that increases in the negative affective valence of a word were related to increases in anger and frustration. Further, increases in negative affective valence and increased confusion and anger were related to decreases in word recognition scores. The second study sought to examine how emotions affect scores on the various measures within a narrative storytelling task. The results demonstrated that confusion was related to decreases in complex sentences and evaluative devices. Additionally, frustration fully mediated the effects of confusion on complex sentences. Finally, the third study examined how emotions affect Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) strategies and narrative storytelling scores. The results demonstrated that frustration was related to decreases in narrative storytelling scores, joy was related to increases in monitoring strategies, frustration was related to decreases in planning strategies, and planning fully mediated the effect of frustration on narrative storytelling scores. Taken together, the results from these three studies provide a novel contribution to the current research in emotions and literacy development in emerging readers.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Buono, Stephanie
Institution: University of Toronto
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7009461279