The Impact of Emotions on Students’ Learning in a General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry Course

Emotions are important contributors to students' motivation, achievement, and persistence toward a goal. A descriptive-correlational study was carried out in order to assess the relationship between student emotions and class performance. A modified version of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Short (AEQ-S) instrument was used with a convenience sample of 111 allied-health students at a university in the Rocky Mountain region to assess students' emotions in a General, Organic, and Biological (GOB) Chemistry course. Student experiences with a range of emotions (enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, relief, and boredom) were measured in the pedagogical contexts of the classroom, studying, and testing for their GOB Chemistry course. The results from the pairwise t tests show that there is a significant difference between the means of the initial assessment and final assessment for the emotions of hope, hopelessness, pride, and shame in all three pedagogical contexts. Additionally, the final assessment data were correlated with final grades in the course. The results suggest that all the positive activating emotions have significant medium positive correlation with final grades and all the negative activating and deactivating emotions have significant medium negative correlation with final grades with the exception of anger in the study setting. These results have implications for GOB Chemistry educators striving to understand the personal factors that influence learning and performance in their students.