Abstract:

Nowadays it is starting a consensus on the importance that emotional factors have on education and there are recent studies that reveal the relationship that exists between emotions and the teaching-learning process, showing that learning and affectivity are complementary pieces of this process. It is very important the auto perception that students have about their achievements and their feelings toward the learning process because motivation can influence directly over their achievement level.

In the Spanish primary education system, teachers are generalist teachers and they have to teach all curriculum areas when they are in-service. However, pre-service teachers, mainly as the result of their previous academic history, usually have negative attitudes towards science teaching and learning at the beginning of their instruction period at the university, as well as a low content knowledge on science topics. Because of these reasons, they don’t feel confident to teach and learn science.

In that sense, their education period at the university should be regarded as an opportunity for them to gain content knowledge on some science topics and to develop more positive attitudes towards science to get the confidence that they need to instruct their pupils in the future. Therefore, it is very important to study the undergraduates’ emotions toward teaching and learning science during their instruction because positive emotions can influence favorably in their achievements. However, if we can know when they have negative emotions during the course, we can have the opportunity to transform and turn them into positive emotions.

We have developed a tool to assess the emotions’ evolution towards teaching and learning science of pre-service primary teachers’ course at the University of Alicante, Spain. This tool was designed to know in which moments our students had felt more or less confident, for example, if they thought that they didn’t understand anything or they didn’t see the utility of they were doing, or to the contrary, when they felt excitement because they become aware that they were learning in-depth something important. This tool consisted in a questionnaire divided into three parts which allow the students to reflect on how they had felt during the science course. In the first part of the questionnaire, undergraduates had to identify freely positive and negative emotional moments during the development of the course. In the second part of the questionnaire, we presented to students 27 selected moments that were ordered chronologically and that we had previously identify as the most relevant of the course. Then, they had to choose freely which ones had been emotionally intense during the course, ranking them from 0 to 10, being 0 the worst emotion and 10 the best emotion. The third part of the questionnaire was an open question in which undergraduates had to think about how they had felt, in general, during the whole science course. This measurement of auto perception has allowed us to identify which were the worst and the best emotion moments for our students in the course, in order to be modified or used in future courses to design strategies that allow us to improve their emotions and, consequently, their achievements.

Keywords:

Problematized science teaching, diurnal astronomy, emotion and the teaching-leaning process, pre-service teachers.