Exploring the Relationship Between Achievement Goals and Concurrent Emotions Experienced Within a Technology-Rich Learning Environment

• In Event: Emotions in Medical Education: Causes and Effects

Abstract

Rationale. BioWorld (Lajoie, 2009) is a technology-rich learning environment (TRE; Lajoie & Azevedo, 2006) designed to stimulate engagement and positive emotions in medical students while they deliberately practice (Ericsson, 2004) their diagnostic reasoning strategies while solving virtual cases. Individual differences in achievement goals and personality traits can influence the emotions students experience while learning (Duffy & Azevedo, 2015; Harley et al., 2015; Sabourin & Lester, 2014). Understanding the relationship between these characteristics and the emotions students’ experience while learning with a TRE can lead to design decisions that provide necessary adaptation based on distinct student profiles (Harley, Lajoie, Frasson, & Hall, 2015); for example, making modifications to tool features, instructional prompts or the graphical user interface.

Individuals differ in their achievement goal orientations (AGO; Elliot & Murayama, 2008) and these AGOs have strong associations with academic emotions, performance, and learning behaviors. In prior work with BioWorld we found a strong relationship between students’ achievement goal orientations and academic emotions in the context of attention to feedback received after a diagnosis was submitted (Naismith and Lajoie, 2014). This paper builds on these findings but differs in the following ways. First, we examine student emotions while they are interacting with BioWorld (activity and prospective outcome emotions) as opposed to how they felt afterward (retrospective outcome emotions). The shift to examining emotions during learning meant a change in the emotions that students were likely to experience. The current analysis examined medical students’ emotional responses toward their over-all emotions that occurred during their interaction with BioWorld rather than in response to feedback they received from the system following the submission of their diagnosis. Our study examines whether a relationship exists in medical students’ goal orientations and their academic achievement emotions while interacting with BioWorld.

Method. 21 medical students volunteered. To measure AGOs we used the revised achievement goal questionnaire (AGQ; Elliot & Murayama, 2008), a 12-item questionnaire used for assessing the four AGOs: (a) mastery-approach, (b) mastery-avoidance, (c) performance-approach, and (d) performance-avoidance. We used an adapted version of the achievement emotions questionnaire (AEQ; Pekrun et al., 2002) to measure the emotions students experienced while interacting with BioWorld: enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness.

Results. Seven multiple regressions were conducted (one for each of the AEQ emotions) where participants scores on the four goal achievement orientations were entered as the predictor variables. Results revealed a significant predictive model (R2 = .50, p = .02) for medical students’ enjoyment (M=3.35; SD=0.70), predicting 50% of the variance observed in learners’ diagnostic accuracy. A statistically significant main effect of performance-approach (β = .79, p < .05) and a marginally significant effect of performance-avoidance (β = -.73, p = .086) were found on medical students’ experience of enjoyment.

Significance. These results provide support for instructional practices that support performance approach goal orientations over performance avoidance orientations. We will seek to replicate these findings with a larger sample prior to AERA. Implications for adapting BioWorld to support adaptive goal orientations to foster positive and adaptive academic achievement emotions will be discussed.

Authors

• Susanne P. Lajoie, McGill University

• Amanda Jarrell, McGill University

• Jason Matthew Harley, University of Alberta

• Melissa Duffy, McGill University

• Maher Chaouachi

• Tara Tressel, McGill University

• Tenzin Doleck, McGill University

• Maedeh Assadat Kazemitabar, McGill University

• Jeffrey Wiseman, McGill University