Emotions as Drivers of Learning and Cognitive Development

Abstract

Settings of learning abound with emotions. Remember the last time you studied some educational material? Depending on your goals and the contents of the mate- rial, you may have enjoyed learning or been bored, experienced flow forgetting time or been frustrated about too many obstacles, felt proud of your progress or confused and ashamed of lack of accomplishment. Furthermore, these diverse emotions affected your effort, motivation to persist, strategies for learning, and cognitive con- cepts – even if you were unaware of these effects. Empirical findings corroborate that learners experience a wide variety of emotions (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002). Until recently, these emotions did not receive much attention by researchers, two exceptions being studies on test anxiety (Zeidner, 1998, 2007) and on the links between causal attributions and achievement emotions (Weiner, 1985). During the past 10 years, however, there has been growing recognition that emotions are of critical importance for human learning and cognitive development (Linnenbrink- Garcia & Pekrun, 2011; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007).