Podium Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Exploring The Emotional Power Of Teacher Feedback By Examining The Relationships Between Students’ Feedback Orientations And Positive Emotions In Learning (#246)

Lan YANG 1
  1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction/Faculty of Education and Human Development, The Education University of Hong Kong, N/A, Hong Kong, China

The power of feedback has been evident in Hattie’s (2009) synthesis study over 800 meta-analyses of influences relating to achievement. Feedback was listed at the top ten (among over one hundred influences) on student achievement. However, it is arguable that the impact of feedback on achievement might not be linear and unidimensional (academic-oriented only). This study is the first to integrate advances in feedback and achievement emotions to explore the emotional power of feedback by testing its relationship with positive emotions in learning. Four important orientations that define students’ self-determination of using teacher feedback were considered (i.e., perceived feedback usefulness, self-efficacy, and responsibility to use feedback to improve academic performance, and social-awareness to use feedback for a purpose of building good student-teacher relationships). A sample of 3077 Chinese students (from Grades 7 to 9) from five secondary schools participated. The results showed significantly positive correlations among the four feedback orientations and positive emotions (enjoyment, hope, pride). Results of a further motivational analysis revealed students’ perceived feedback usefulness was the strongest predictor of positive emotions followed by students’ responsibility and self-efficacy to use teacher feedback. Social-awareness was not a significant-predictor of emotions. These patterns were consistent across enjoyment, hope, and pride.