Emotional responses to innovative Science teaching methods: Acquiring emotional data in a General Science teacher education class

Abstract

The current work tries to inquiry how different teaching methods affect on the student’s emotional performance. The traditional questionnaire for data collection has been replaced by in-situ, on-line-assisted, survey. This instrument was continoulsy applied over the course of 17 General Science lessons.  The experiment involved 120 prospective primary education teachers. Emotions to choose: rejection, boredom, satisfaction, surprise and the teaching methods involved were pure oral presentation, oral presentation with gamification, oral presentation with audiovisual support, oriented research, and hands-on activities.  When the teaching method was changed to gamification or hands-on activities, the prospective teachers felt dynamic emotions, whereas they generally felt satisfaction or boredom (static emotions) with a traditional pure oral presentation.  The students mainly identified the teaching method as being the most influential reason for having chosen their prevalent emotion, reflected in a dramatic increase in emotional performance when they were taught with innovative methods.