Emotional Climate and Academic Performance

Classroom and homeroom emotional climates have a significant influence on student performance, a new study confirms.

The school emotional climate can be defined as the "quality of social and emotional interactions in the classroom between and among students and teachers"... 

Studying about 1,650 students from 3 secondary public schools in Israel, researchers recently measured their aggregated levels of emotions during class and perceived emotional support from their homeroom teachers to determine whether these two variables had an impact on their academic performance.

Positive and negative affects were measured using self-reports asking students to score on a 5-point Likert scale the extent to whch they experienced different emotions duing school over the padt month. Likewise, emotional support was operationalized as their degree of agreement with such statements as “Does your homeroom teacher try to support you when you are sad or distressed in class?” and “Does
your teacher truly understand how you feel about different things?”

Confirming their hypothesis, the researchers found that both positive emotions during class as well as homeroom teachers' emotional support were noth predictors of higher GPAs.

The reason, they theorized, could be that positive affects are associated with higher levels of engagement and foster greater internal motivation, while negative affects impact students' ability to focus and deplete the cognitive resources necessary for learning

Source: Kashy-Rosenbaum et alia (2018)