Sometimes, being anxious before an exam is a good thing. That’s according to Reinhard Pekrun, who has spent much of his career researching the interactions between emotions and achievement.

“Being a little bit nervous before an exam can motivate you to invest effort to avoid failure,” Pekrun explains. “As long as you are able to keep a sense of optimism, and the anxiety is not so intense that it stops you from focusing on the task, it can be beneficial.”

Pekrun is a professor of psychology at the University of Essex, here in the UK, and a professorial fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney.

He’s spent decades researching “achievement emotions”, including anxiety, but also “a broad range of positive emotions and negative emotions, like anger, boredom and shame”.

The scale of the impact that emotions can have on how we learn is, Pekrun explains, often not fully recognised. This matters because it means that teachers could be missing out on a whole area of research that could be helping them to motivate their pupils and support them to succeed.

So, what do teachers need to know about how to harness the science of emotion? We sat down with Pekrun to find out.

Tes: What do we know about the scale of the impact that emotions can have on us in our daily lives?

Pekrun: Without emotions, we could survive physically, but not psychologically.

I think there are three key areas to consider here. First, emotions direct our motivation. We are motivated to pursue goals that we value and to avoid events that we are afraid of.

Second, emotions direct our thinking. If you are in a positive mood, you are able to think in a flexible way, to become creative and strategic. If you are in a negative mood, that can also be beneficial: it can help us to think critically, for example, when we evaluate decisions.

This is illustrated by a study we just completed with university maths students. We induced a positive emotion for one group and an anxious state of mind for another group.

We then asked the groups to generate mathematical ideas about a geometrical figure, and to evaluate others’ ideas about the same figure. It turned out that, under enjoyment, idea generation was substantially better, while in an anxious mood, critical evaluation was better.

Finally, emotions affect our health. They influence the functioning of our immune system and they influence our sleep, but there are also myriad more specific effects.

For example, research has shown that excessive anxiety can lead to a reduction of the length of telomeres. These are the protective caps on our chromosomes, and when these caps are too short, then cells die prematurely.

So, emotions affect our actions and our body, and they also have an impact on our social life. We cannot do without them.

If emotions are so important, why do you think they get so little attention when we think about, for example, how to help pupils learn?

People are not always thinking about their emotions and their behaviour, because these are often just automatic processes we use to navigate our everyday life.

Typically, it’s only when things change, or when we find ourselves in a critical situation, that we start thinking about what is going on: “How do I feel right now? How can I deal with the situation?” But more than 90 per cent of what’s going on in terms of our thinking, behaviour and emotions is just below this level of reflection.

You mentioned that inducing a positive mood and a sense of enjoyment can contribute to better idea generation. Do you think that’s a sign that using “fun” activities in the classroom can be beneficial?

Research shows that it depends on the type of enjoyment. We need to distinguish between two kinds of joy or humour in the classroom. One would be task related, even if it is only indirectly related to the task in the beginning, just to make a start. The other would not be task related in any way - not related to the content or the curriculum.

The first type of enjoyment can be extremely positive. If a teacher is able to spark enthusiasm in the classroom by using humorous examples to explain the learning content, but also by being enthusiastic themselves, then that is really positive. If it is about just making jokes all the time or trying to create a positive mood without considering the content, then that is just distracting.

So, if teachers demonstrate enthusiasm, that can make a class more enthusiastic. Is the same true for negative emotions?

Yes, both positive and negative emotions are catching. It’s what we call “emotional contagion”. If everybody else in the group is laughing, you tend to laugh. If you see someone crying, you might want to cry, too.

The mechanism, to a large extent, is mimicry. We see the facial expression, the postural expression, the vocal expression of emotion in others, and we immediately, within fractions of seconds, mimic the expression and then feel the same emotion.

So, that’s one primary mechanism by which teachers can spark enthusiasm in their pupils, by being enthusiastic themselves, on the condition that it’s authentic, and pupils believe it. If you really like teaching and enjoy being with the pupils, that’s contagious.

And if you’re bored as a teacher, that’s also going to come across.

It’s worth mentioning that this goes both ways. As a teacher, if pupils are engaged and display that they enjoy being in class, you will enjoy teaching more.

If a pupil is feeling negative emotions in class, what do we know about how that affects their performance?

Negative or unpleasant emotions have basically four effects. First, they deplete cognitive resources in our working memory. They distract our attention, so we cannot focus on the learning material.

Second, they undermine the development of interest and intrinsic motivation (which is the motivation to perform an activity for its own sake and not for external reward).

Third, they undermine flexible thinking and the flexible use of strategies, making us more rigid. And this relates to the fourth effect, which is that they prompt you to rely more on external guidance from teachers, parents or supervisors. Depending on the situation, that can be beneficial, to an extent, but it can undermine the development of self-regulation.

‘Negative emotions can be beneficial if they are not too intense’

Overall, emotions like anxiety, shame, hopelessness and boredom are negatively associated with academic achievement.

The reverse is true for positive emotions. Those are positive predictors. And what we have found is that the effect size for emotions is similar to the effects of intelligence, or IQ, so it’s really a powerful predictor.

But there is a caveat. Negative emotions can be beneficial if they are not too intense, and if you uphold the expectation that you will succeed in the end.

So confusion, for example, can be really beneficial, as long as you’re motivated to resolve the confusion and solve the problem. It is sometimes good, therefore, for teachers to confuse their pupils, to an extent.

How does the impact of emotions on learning change as pupils get older and develop their emotional regulation skills?

The basic mechanisms of how emotions impact learning and behaviour are pretty much the same across our lives. What changes is cognitive maturity, which has effects on the emotions that we can process.

Very early, in preschool and the first years of primary school, the range of emotions children can process is still pretty limited. Emotions like joy, anger and anxiety are already experienced during the first few months of life, but the ability to process more complex social emotions, like admiration, contempt or envy - which depend on being able to compare yourself to others - develops later.

In secondary school, the full range of human emotions is available, and the ability to regulate those emotions has evolved, too.

What does the evolution of that emotional regulation look like? What strategies can teachers encourage pupils of different ages to use?

There are five primary ways to regulate emotions. The first is by selecting or modifying situations in a way that fits our personality and our interests, such as by selecting a partner, selecting a job or, if you are 8 years old, selecting your friends in a way that serves your emotions.

The second way is through directing your attention; you can turn your attention towards emotional stimuli or away from them. This depends on the development of executive functions in working memory, which happens during the preschool and primary school years.

It’s a rapid process, but is not finalised before the age of 8, 9 or 10. Deliberately turning attention on or distracting attention away is not yet possible at the age of 6 months, for example.

The third option is through cognition (thinking). The primary way this works to manage emotions is through re-evaluating the situation. For example, if I have failed an exam, my first thoughts might be that it’s a total disaster, my career is completely ruined and I’m a worthless person.

However, if I re-evaluate the situation and realise there are second chances, then it begins to seem not so bad, because I can learn from the mistakes I made.

Number four would be developing one’s competences to experience the emotions that come with success. This means investing effort to work towards mastery or identifying and closing knowledge gaps. This work starts early, even before birth, but the ability to do it deliberately comes later on.

And the final one would be choosing to suppress emotions or express emotions - so, directly modulating the emotional response. That is also not yet really possible at the beginning of primary school, and this is why, with pupils of that age, you see all the emotions they can experience. The primary classroom is an extremely emotional place.

In contrast, in many secondary school classrooms, everybody has a straight face. You don’t see their emotions anymore because they’re able to control their expressions.

If you’re a primary school teacher, you are in a relatively good position compared with your secondary colleagues, because you see what is going on with your pupils. But with 13- or 14-year-olds, you don’t know. Are they bored? Are they confused? Looking at their faces, you might not be able to tell.

At that age, students know that others can infer from their facial expressions how engaged or worried they are. They know that if they look bored, then their teacher might infer that they’re not motivated. And they don’t want their teacher to know they’re not motivated, so they keep a neutral face.

What is the way around that, for secondary teachers? Is it as simple as checking in a bit more often with students of that age, to find out where they are emotionally?

Absolutely. But trust is needed as a basis for that. If your students trust you, they will be more willing to tell you how they are doing, compared with a more distant relationship in which you demonstrate your power position and students shut down and do not tell you the truth about their situation.

What else can teachers do to make sure that pupils are experiencing and managing their emotions in a way that motivates them to learn?

Teachers need to help pupils develop a sense of control and competence, and a sense of value, which means pupils see learning and achievement as important.

The first thing research suggests is to strengthen the cognitive quality of your instruction. If you provide good examples and good explanations, and if your materials are clearly structured, then that supports pupils in developing a sense of competence, and helps them to feel in control over their learning.

It’s also important to match task demands to pupils’ competence. If tasks are too easy, pupils will be bored; if tasks are too difficult, pupils will be anxious.

‘The primary classroom is an extremely emotional place’

Another thing I would suggest is to consider the emotional and motivational quality of instruction. This is about value messages - making clear to pupils why we do this, and what the bigger picture is - and also about connecting tasks and learning materials to pupils’ interests.

So, not talking about abstract mathematical concepts only, but connecting them to their daily life.

You also need to make sure you’re satisfying pupils’ basic needs, like the need for autonomy and the need for social relatedness.

What does that look like?

The need for autonomy is about providing choices, so teachers should make it possible for pupils to select tasks, transform tasks and generate tasks on their own. This requires them to be capable of doing this, which takes us back to competency.

The need for social relatedness can be satisfied by making it possible for pupils to connect to each other through group work, for example. You cannot do cooperative learning every moment of every lesson, but it should be a component of your teaching in order to satisfy pupils’ need to relate to others.

How you implement goals and expectations in class is also important. If your expectations of an individual pupil are too high, then that places too much pressure on them and reduces their sense of competence, rather than strengthening it, which can exacerbate their achievement anxiety.

In terms of goal structures, if you create a competitive goal structure in the classroom whereby you are evaluating achievement not just according to pupils’ mastery of the material, but in terms of who is outperforming who, that might be beneficial for the few “winners” who perform highly, but the large majority is going to suffer because their possibilities to succeed relative to others are limited.

It’s substantially better to implement a mastery goal structure, where the focus is on acquiring competencies and improving your own performance, rather than outperforming others.

This has implications for how teachers should deliver feedback, too.

What would those be?

It’s clear that positive feedback generates positive emotions but that negative feedback generates negative emotions. To avoid these negative effects, it’s important to concentrate on providing informational, rather than evaluative, feedback: what can pupils do in the next steps of their learning sequence to get better?

Implement an “error culture” in class that makes it possible for pupils to be courageous enough to make mistakes and to perceive mistakes not as an indicator of lack of ability, but as an opportunity to learn.

Those points are all things that teachers can manage, to quite an extent. But there is also a message here for school leaders and policymakers.

If, from an early age, we make children’s educational “careers” too contingent on individual performance, then that exacerbates the importance of performing well and avoiding failure, which, in turn, drives anxiety.

To a certain degree, anxiety can be a good thing, as I mentioned. However, we have a mental health crisis in education that is due to the overly frequent and intense negative emotions pupils experience during learning and before exams. The systems of high-stakes testing we have in so many countries around the world are creating excessive anxiety in too many pupils, which really isn’t necessary.

We should avoid or reduce high-stakes testing wherever possible. We need a paradigm shift towards education being emotionally healthier.

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