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Research in Action
issue 89 jun 2024
Reigniting Joy in Learning through Classroom Pedagogy
Recent research in educational neuroscience underscores the importance of emotional engagement in students to spark interest and nurture a lasting passion for learning across all subjects. How can we support teachers to have a better understanding of how students experience learning content in a subject area? Dr Tan Mei Ying, Dr Muhammad Nazir Bin Amir and Dr Tan Aik Lim share their concept paper, which introduces a way to reshape teachers’ teaching practices, at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference (RPIC) 2024.
From left: Dr Tan Mei Ying, Dr Tan Aik Lim, Dr Muhammad Nazir Bin Amir
Fostering Intrinsic Motivation in Learning
Figure 1. A flying wheel toy.
During the team’s paper presentation at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference (RPIC) 2024, they handed out a colourful flying wheel toy to every participant and encouraged them to play with it. As everyone grew excited with the toy in hand, Dr Muhammad Nazir, Master Teacher/Educational Support at the Academy of Singapore Teachers, shared how he and his colleagues capitalized on the appeal of this toy to teach Science content.
“When I was teaching Science at a secondary school, I observed that low progress learners from the Normal Academic (NA) and Normal Technical (NT) streams were less engaged in the classroom compared to high progress learners from the Express stream,” Nazir shares. He saw this as an opportunity to collaborate with other teachers who were facing similar difficulties. Rather than thinking about “fixing” the students, they focused on “fixing” their lessons through exploring a variety of teaching approaches. “As toys usually appeal to students, we decided to experiment with using the flying wheel toy (see Figure 1) in the classroom to demonstrate scientific concepts,” he adds.
Such a move not only led to academically less-motivated students being more enthusiastic about learning but also brought joy and rigour in learning to students across all profiles. He emphasizes that the toy is used as a teaching tool to help create in the students an emotional connection to the content.
He reminds us that learning is both a cognitive and emotional process, and enjoyment is an important aspect of the learning process. In other examples, he demonstrated how several preschool teachers used a simple magic colouring book to enthuse children in learning about “pretend play”, and fondly recalls an unforgettable experience where his university lecturer used a drone with colourful lights in a dark lecture theatre to enthuse his students to learn coding as part of an engineering course.
“Teachers play an important role in bringing about the joy of learning through our teaching and these teachers have prioritized their students’ learning experiences at the heart of their teaching. They showed that interest in a subject matter can be injected in an entire class through teaching that is situated within a universally appealing context – one that evokes a high level of emotional engagement,” he says.
The examples shared by Nazir illustrate how joyful teaching ideas can come alive in the classroom by using the Relevant, Appealing and Personal (RAP) pedagogical guideline. Developed through his research, this guideline aims to foster intrinsic motivation and engagement in students’ learning in Singapore classrooms (Amir, 2022).
“Using the RAP pedagogical guideline, teachers are able to develop creative and joyful teaching ideas to deliver subject content, which moves students’ motivation from ‘having to learn’ to ‘wanting to learn’, and further develops students’ positive attitudes towards learning,” he remarks.
Emotional Arousal as An Indicator of Student Engagement
How can teachers determine the level of student interest? Instead of focusing on facial expressions (i.e., smiling) and overt emotions (i.e., laughing), the team, led by Dr Tan Aik Lim, a Research Fellow with NIE’s Office of Education Research, introduces a novel perspective on how to look at determining students’ emotions.
“To better understand our students’ emotions, we propose using the framework developed by James Russell – the Circumplex model of affect (Russell, 1980) (see Figure 2). It maps different emotions onto a two-dimensional space of valence and arousal; the horizontal axis measures the valence (i.e., the type of emotion), while the vertical axis measures the arousal (i.e., the magnitude of emotion),” Aik Lim explains.
One way to measure the intensity or magnitude of emotions is through electrodermal activity (EDA), which refers to the varying electrical properties of the skin in response to sweat secretion by the eccrine sweat glands (Benedek & Kaernbach, 2010).
“Studies have shown that changes in electrical conduction of the skin are an indicator of arousal, attention, engagement and emotional responses. From my research, these changes also indicate triggers of interest as well,” he adds. (For more information, refer to the paper by Tan et al., 2023.)
To detect and monitor students’ EDA and heart rate, the team utilized physiological sensors that are found in new wearable technology. He points out how the physiological data derived directly from the wearer’s body can pinpoint the specific instances where there are peaks in the wearer’s emotions. This is more helpful and objective than just receiving lesson or activity feedback from students, which might be in the form of a general response such as “It was interesting” or “It was fun” and be subjected to external influences such as peer influence.
“The EDA data can provide us with a more nuanced and accurate view of parts of the activity that engaged the students or caught their attention. You can also discuss the data with the students or among other teachers,” he notes.
Figure 2. The Circumplex model of affect.
What Does It Mean for Educators?
When attempting to apply what they learnt at professional learning sessions about promoting student motivation in learning into practice, teachers may find it challenging to do so as there are conflicting findings in this topic. Furthermore, most of the studies measure the impact of motivation and engagement using a cognitive or behavioural lens.
“This is one of the pressures educators face when they are in the classroom, especially if they want to engage students in joyful learning experiences,” Dr Tan Mei Ying explains.
The team is hopeful that educators can begin to story or narrate teaching and learning in terms of these joyful learning experiences. “When different teachers come together to narrate and discuss their students’ peak moments of learning, they can strengthen their understanding of and hone their expertise in emotional engagement,” Mei Ying says.
“We are confident that the education fraternity can build teachers not only as narrators who can situate pedagogical innovation within the professional landscape, but also as innovators in teaching and learning across multiple layers of the education eco-system,” she adds.
References
Amir, N. (2022). Fostering Student Motivation and Engagement Through the Relevant, Appealing, and Personal (RAP) Pedagogical Guideline: Tech Stories From Singapore. In Bonk, C. J. & Zhu (Eds.), Transformative Teaching Around the World: Stories of Cultural Impact, Technology Integration, and Innovative Pedagogy, 87-91.
Benedek, M., & Kaernbach, C. (2010). Decomposition of skin conductance data by means of nonnegative deconvolution. Psychophysiology, 47(4), 647-658.
Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161-1178.
Tan, A. L., Gillies, R., & Jamaludin, A. (2023). Psychophysiological methods to study the triggers of interest: A Singapore case study. Current Psychology, 42, 28298-28308.
