Faculty and teacher emotions in different contexts

Schwab, Carolin (2021): Faculty and teacher emotions in different contexts: an investigation of emotions for grading and emotions for teaching in online compared to face-to-face settings. Dissertation, LMU München: Fakultät für Psychologie und Pädagogik

Abstract

Research on teacher and faculty emotions increased over the last years. There are, however, many tasks in both professions that are under-researched in general and with respect to emotional experiences in particular. Research on teacher and faculty emotions is missing with respect to a) one task outside the classroom that received surprisingly little research attention, although it takes up a good portion of teachers’ and faculty members’ time and is highly relevant for students’ future careers, namely grading student work, and b) one form of teaching that started to become increasingly wide-spread especially in higher education, namely online teaching. To gain some insights into teacher and faculty emotions in these neglected research areas, we conducted three studies to investigate 1) teacher emotions for grading as elicited by a task-inherent cue of an essay (handwriting quality) and the emotions’ effects on grades, 2) faculty emotions for grading as compared to emotions for teaching and research as well as antecedents of faculty grading emotions from a control-value perspective in two countries (U.S. and Germany), and 3) faculty emotions for online teaching in synchronous lessons as compared to face-to-face teaching. In our first study we aimed to test if naturally elicited teacher emotions influence grading, an under-researched task that takes up a considerable portion of teachers’ professional lives (OECD, 2014). Previous research showed that the effects of externally induced mood on grades were mixed (Brackett et al., 2013; Townsend et al., 1989). To shed light on this issue, the present study sought to induce discrete positive (enjoyment) and negative (anger and boredom) activity emotions in a grading situation by means of a naturally-occurring, material inherent cue (handwriting quality) to explore the differentiated effects of the three discrete emotions on grades. Our experiment involved 73 student teachers (62 female) grading two essays of similar content quality in varied handwriting quality. Two-condition within-participant mediation analyses (Montoya & Hayes, 2017) showed that the effect of handwriting on grades (0.32, SE = 0.15, CI [0.03, 0.61]; equals one third of a letter grade) was mediated by enjoyment (0.26, SE = 0.09, CI [0.06, 0.43]) and anger (0.44, SE = 0.12, CI [0.21, 0.67]), but not by boredom (0.02, SE = 0.03, CI [−0.04, 0.10]). That is, the better compared to the worse handwriting quality induced higher levels of enjoyment and lower levels of anger, which in turn led to the assignment of better and worse grades, respectively. Results hint in the direction that the effect of anger on grades is stronger than the effect of enjoyment on grades, which means that anger may be a more severe threat to grading reliability than enjoyment. The role of boredom in grading remains to be explored, because the handwriting manipulation failed to induce boredom. The differentiated results warrant further research to identify the specific antecedents and effects of various discrete emotions that naturally emerge in grading situations to find ways to make grading a less aversive task. Thereby, negative consequences for teachers’ well-being on the one hand and students‘ future careers through biased grades on the other, may be prevented. Grading is not only a relevant and under-researched task of teachers’, but also of faculty members’ profession. Therefore, we aimed to investigate grading emotions in more detail in a faculty sample as a next step. Research on faculty emotions is scarce, and specifically investigations of faculty members’ emotions during specific tasks. Previous research mainly considered emotions while teaching (Stupnisky et al., 2019b), more recent work started to compare emotional experiences between the contexts of teaching and research (e.g., Stupnisky et al., 2016). Grading as a distinct and influential task has not been considered to date, though. Therefore, the second study aimed to investigate six discrete emotions (enjoyment, pride, boredom, anxiety, anger, frustration) faculty may experience during grading. Study 2a compared faculty emotions for grading to emotions for research and teaching (U.S. sample, n = 1,226). Mean comparisons showed that grading generally elicited less positive (especially enjoyment, but also pride) and more negative emotions (especially boredom, but also frustration and to some extent anger) than research and teaching. One exception was anxiety, which was experienced less frequently in grading than in the other two tasks, possibly due to a lack of direct negative consequences when “failing”. Study 2b further examined faculty emotions for grading through the lens of control-value theory by identifying emotion-specific appraisal patterns in two countries (U.S., n = 245 and Germany, n = 201). The cross-country mean level comparisons showed that with respect to grading, U.S. faculty generally experienced higher levels of control, competence, and positive value than German faculty, but perceived similar levels of negative value (cost) with respect to grading. Furthermore, U.S. faculty reported substantially higher frequencies of pride and anxiety and lower frequencies of anger, but similar frequencies of enjoyment, boredom, and frustration, compared to German faculty. The cross-country differences were probably due to the differing circumstances under which grading occurred in the two countries’ samples. Touching on possible antecedents of faculty grading emotions, multiple linear regressions revealed that the most important predictor for grading emotions across both samples was cost (negative value), in terms of the extent to which faculty perceived grading as a thankless task that kept them away from more meaningful tasks. Predictive patterns varied across emotions and countries. In the German sample, diagnostic competence was another highly important predictor across all emotions, which consistently predicted all positive and negative emotions in the expected direction. In the U.S. sample, social value was another important value dimension above and beyond negative value that influenced four emotions (pride, anxiety, anger, frustration) in the expected way, but in the German sample it influenced anxiety only. Reasons for the differing patterns between the U.S. and German context were discussed. Overall, results imply that universities should aim to improve the circumstances of grading to optimize the emotional experiences of faculty, perhaps by supporting the development of grading skills or more substantive acknowledgement of the task of grading. The previous study contributed to understanding faculty grading emotions, but it only tapped at teaching emotions within a context-comparison (as compared to grading and research). As teaching is an integral part of faculty members’ duties, the emotions experienced therein warrant research. And although faculty emotions in teaching have been comparably well-researched, there is one form of teaching that received little research attention with respect to emotions thus far: online teaching. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, brought immediate attention to this constantly-growing form of higher education. Therefore, we tried to answer the question how moving higher education teaching and learning to online supported environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic affected the teaching experiences of university faculty. To this end, we obtained data from a study by Daumiller et al. (2019) and replicated the study design to compare the experiences of faculty teaching face-to-face classes before the pandemic (Sample 1) and faculty teaching synchronous online classes in a time of pandemic (Sample 2; data collected by the authors during the pandemic). Participants answered (a) a basic questionnaire, and (b) several session-specific diaries (1-10 sessions). Analyses of the basic questionnaire revealed that Sample 1 (n = 101) and Sample 2 (n = 71) were comparable in their perceived autonomy, competence, relatedness, and self-efficacy before the pandemic as well as in their stress at work during the time of data collection. When judged against their own prior experiences, faculty perceived their relatedness (d = 1.34, BF = 1.2e12), teaching satisfaction (d = 0.32, BF = 2.18), and positive valence of teaching (d = 0.36, BF = 5.13) to be reduced during online teaching compared to face-to-face teaching, but not their autonomy and competence. Analyses of the aggregated session-specific diary data revealed that when teaching online in a time of pandemic, the satisfaction of the basic needs for autonomy (d = 0.56, BF = 56.10), competence (d = 0.51, BF = 22.40), and relatedness (d = 0.61, BF = 184.98) was poorer and emotional experiences less favorable (fewer enjoyment, d = 0.68, BF = 823.03; more anger, d = 0.56, BF = 59.85; tendency towards more shame, d = 0.39, BF = 3.05; similar levels of pride, boredom, and anxiety) compared to face-to-face teaching. The more the digital teaching environment allowed for quasi-live experiences (i.e., seeing more students through their cameras), the more faculty tended to feel related to their students (β = .26, p = .03, BF = 2.04). The results imply that it is important to foster digital teaching skills to enhance the satisfaction of the needs for autonomy and competence and to create digital environments that allow for building relationships with students in order to optimize faculty members’ and students’ emotional experiences when teaching and learning online. Nevertheless, face-to-face teaching is an important element of university education, which can be complemented, but not fully replaced by online offers after the COVID-crisis. Overall, we conclude that teacher and faculty emotions and their antecedents and effects in certain contexts are still under-researched and need to be examined in more depth to eventually improve the emotional experiences of teachers and faculty in less pleasant tasks of their professions to subsequently increase well-being and reduce the high burnout rates.

• Dokumententyp: Dissertationen (Dissertation, LMU München)
• Keywords: Emotion, Grading, Teaching, COVID-19
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften ; 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 370 Erziehung, Schul- und Bildungswesen
• Fakultäten: Fakultät für Psychologie und Pädagogik
• Sprache der Hochschulschrift: Englisch
• Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 1. Oktober 2021
• 1. Bericht­erstatter:in: Frenzel, Anne