Exploring processes of collaborative creativity—The role of emotions in children''s joint creative writing

This paper reports a study on children's classroom-based collaborative creative writing. Based on socio-cultural theory, the central aim of the research was to contribute to current understanding of young children's creativity, and describe ways in which peer collaboration can resource, stimulate and enhance classroom-based creative writing. The study drew on longitudinal observations of ongoing classroom activities in year 3 and year 4 classrooms, working with 24 children (12 pairs) aged 7–9 in England. The pairs’ collaborative creative writing sessions were observed and recorded using video and audio equipment in the literacy classroom and in the ICT suite with 2–4 recordings per pair. A functional model was developed to analyse cognitive processes associated with creative text composition (engagement and reflection) via the in-depth study of collaborative discourse. Based on the analysis of paired talk, the study has identified discourse patterns and collaborative strategies which facilitate sharedness and thus support joint creative writing activities. A key finding was the centrality of emotions in the observed creative writing sessions. This paper discusses the role of emotion-driven thinking in phases of shared engagement. The study has implications for creativity research and pedagogy, revealing the special features of shared creative thinking. It also contributes to the current methodological debate about how best to analyse collaborative discourse, highlighting the need to explore the generalisability and domain specificity of existing characterisations of productive groupwork.     

The dark side of perceived positive regard: When parents’ well-intended motivation strategies increase students’ test anxiety

Parental academic conditional positive regard (PACPR) is a socializing strategy in which parents provide more affection, esteem, and attention than usual when their child studies hard and achieves in school. It is favored and recommended as a positive parenting strategy, whereas empirical findings increasingly document serious psychological costs of this well-intended strategy. PACPR can be conceptualized as an important antecedent of test anxiety. However, no study has tested this assumption yet, and research on antecedents of test anxiety is generally scarce. Based on assumptions from self-determination and control-value theory, we conducted one study with secondary students (trait test anxiety, N = 653, M = 13 years) and one study with university students (state test anxiety and test performance, N = 166, M = 20 years), to examine distal (i.e., perceived PACPR) and proximal antecedents (i.e., contingent self-esteem as value cognition; ability self-concept as control cognition) of students’ test anxiety. In line with our hypotheses, path analyses revealed a positive relation between perceived PACPR and test anxiety, and that contingent self-esteem mediated this relation. Ability self-concept showed inverse relations with test anxiety, which, in turn, predicted poorer test performance in Study 2. Unexpectedly, we found no interactive effect of contingent self-esteem and ability self-concept. Our results extend prior research on psychological costs of PACPR to the field of achievement emotions, and suggest that the detrimental effects of perceived PACPR on test anxiety can be generalized onto students with high and low ability self-concept, respectively. Possible reasons of our findings, and practical implications, are discussed.     

Feeling good,learning better? Effectivity of an emotional design procedure in multimedia learning

Emotional designing describes the elicitation of positive affect during learning through specific design elements of the learning environment to enhance learning. This experimental study examined the effectivity of an emotional design procedure on learning performance. Moreover, the learner’s affective states before learning were taken into consideration as possible moderators. 145 university students learned for 20?min either in a multimedia positive affect inducing learning environment (n?=?85) or a neutral multimedia learning environment (n?=?60). The Affect was measured before, during, and after learning. Performance was tested afterwards. To control for possible confounding effects, achievement motivation, emotion regulation, and situational interest were measured. In contrast to earlier findings, no superiority effect of the emotional design procedure was found. Furthermore, the effectivity of the emotional design procedure was not moderated by student’s prior effective states. However, there was a main influence of student’s positive affect on transfer performance.     

Is it good to value math? Investigating mothers’ impact on their children’s test anxiety based on control-value theory

The present study investigated individual and social antecedents of test anxiety. Based on Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions, we studied the relationship of students’ test anxiety with students’ control and value cognitions, the interaction of control and value cognitions, and parent-reported family valuing of mathematics. The sample consisted of 356 German 5th graders and their mothers. In line with theoretical assumptions, results of structural equation modeling showed that, when modeled together, control cognitions (i.e., academic self-concept) were negatively related to test anxiety while value cognitions (i.e., interest) showed a positive relationship. The significant interaction between control and value revealed that value was strongly related to test anxiety when subjective control was low and only weakly related to test anxiety when subjective control was high. High family values of mathematics were positively related to test anxiety. In addition, family values showed two indirect relations with test anxiety which were in opposite directions: Highly valuing math in families reduced students’ test anxiety by enhancing their control cognitions, and at the same time increased students’ test anxiety by enhancing students’ value cognitions. The overall indirect effect was a reduction in test anxiety, which shows that the anxiety-reducing effect via students’ control perceptions was stronger than the anxiety-enhancing effect via students’ value cognitions.     

How effective are mobile devices for language learning? A meta-analysis

Language learning has undergone rapid changes over the past several years, from computer-assisted learning to the more recent mobile-device-assisted learning. Although mobile devices have become valuable language-learning tools, the evident substantial contribution of mobile devices to language learning have not yet been investigated. The present meta-analysis of 44 peer-reviewed journal articles and doctoral dissertations that were written over a 20-year period (1993–2013), with 9154 participants, revealed that mobile-device-assisted language instruction has produced a meaningful improvement with an overall mean effect size of 0.55. Different effect sizes for moderator variables, such as learning stages, hardware use, software used, intervention settings, teaching methods, intervention durations, learning skills, target languages, and L1/L2, were also reported. The results are discussed, together with their implications for future research and practices on the use of mobile devices in language learning.