ABSTRACT
As ubiquitous as emotions are in daily classroom life, scholarship that prioritizes their development and roles in teaching and learning have been relatively sparse until the last decade (Hagenauer & Hascher, 2010; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007). At the same time, the belief that emotions have a central role in classroom learning seems to have always been acknowledged, especially the benefits of an enjoyable learning environment. For example, published in 1976, Santrock reported an experimental study with 108 first and second graders in which he manipulated the (a) physical setting via happy, sad, or neutral decorations, (b) “affective tone” by asking students to think happy, sad, or neutral thoughts, and (c) “social agent’s affect” through the experimenter telling a happy, sad, or neutral story. Santrock (1976) concluded that the children’s self control, measured by their persistence on a boring task, was influenced by the affective tone of their thoughts, physical space, and relationship with the social agent. He saw these findings as suggesting strong implications for classroom practice.
There is no reason to believe that the child’s self-control in a classroom setting with a teacher would be substantially different from the type of situation evaluated in the present study. Thus, students who think about happy things, have happy interchanges with teachers, and who work in a happy room could be expected to persevere longer as tasks become repetitive and boring to them than students who experience less positively valenced affective situations.
(Santrock, 1976, p. 534)