Discrete Emotions in Summative Feedback: Differentiated Effects of Anger, Enjoyment, and Boredom When Assigning Grades

• In Event: Exploring Links Between Instructional Feedback and Emotions

Abstract

Grading can be considered as a form of summative feedback (Dixson & Worrell, 2016). Taking into consideration that grading takes up a considerable portion (approximately 13%; OECD, 2014) of teachers’ professional lives and that it is perceived as an emotional task (Steinberg, 2008), it is important to shed light on processes involved in grading.
Previous research showed that externally induced emotions influence grading in emotion congruent ways, that is negative emotions lead to lower and positive emotions lead to higher grades for the same essays (Brackett, Floman, Ashton-James, Cherkasskiy, & Salovey, 2013). Missing from this picture is whether naturally occurring cues can elicit teacher emotions, which in turn influence grades. Therefore, we sought to show that a material-inherent cue (handwriting) can naturally elicit discrete emotions (anger, enjoyment, and boredom), which influence grades in differentiated ways.
Our experiment involved 74 pre-service teachers (62 female; Mage = 25.31(SD = 4.30)) from two universities in southern Germany grading two different essays of similar quality written in different handwritings (good vs. bad) one after the other: after having read an essay, they directly assigned a grade and self-reported their emotions when grading the respective essay. Participants experienced both levels of each within variable (e.g. essay A in good handwriting was combined with essay B in bad handwriting). The discrete emotions anger (e.g. “I was angry while grading”), enjoyment (e.g. “I had fun grading the text”), and boredom (e.g. “I was so bored during grading, that time seemed to stand still”) were measured on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 4 = strongly agree) with three items each. Grades were assigned according to the German grading system on a scale from 1 (very good) to 6 (insufficient) and were then reverse-coded. All variables were transformed in such a way that they represented the participants’ emotions and the assigned grade in the good versus the bad handwriting condition – irrespective of the order and the essay in which the good and bad handwriting were presented in the study.
Two-condition within-participant mediation analyses (Montoya & Hayes, 2017) was used to estimate the unstandardized path coefficients, which represent the mean difference within each participant comparing the good and the bad handwriting condition. Analyses revealed that the unstandardized effect of handwriting on grades was 0.32 (CI[0.03, 0.61]), which equals one third of a letter grade. The relationship was mediated via anger (0.44, CI[0.21, 0.67]) and enjoyment (0.26, CI[0.06, 0.43]) in emotion congruent ways, but not via boredom (0.02, CI[- 0.04, 0.10]). That is, good handwriting predicted a lower level of anger and a higher level of enjoyment, whereas it did not predict boredom. A higher level of anger and enjoyment, in turn, predicted lower and higher grades, respectively, whereas boredom did not predict grades.
Results suggest that it is important to further investigate grading as an emotional task, in order to prevent negative consequences for teachers‘ well-being on the one hand and students‘ future careers through biased grades, on the other.

Authors

• Carolin Schwab, University of Munich

• Anne C. Frenzel, University of Munich (LMU)