Designing emotionally sound instruction - an empirical validation of the FEASP-approach - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Instructional Psychology, Dec, 2001 by Hermann Astleitner

5) Is there a relation between the application of the FEASP-strategies and the experience of certain types of emotions during instruction? If the hurdles connected to questions 1) to 4) are successfully taken, then it is still not sure, whether the FEASP-strategies can affect emotional experiences as proposed by the FEASP-approach. The effectiveness of the FEASP-strategies is an important issue for instructional designers, because in instructional practice only those strategies will be used that significantly help to solve practical problems. 6) In order to be able to properly answer the questions 2) to 5), a scale for measuring FEASP-strategies and-emotions has to be developed. It is an open question of what quality in respect to reliability and validity these scales are?

Within this paper, it is tried to answer these six questions based on descriptive statistical analysis of data from teachers' and students' questionnaires.

Method

Participants

The sample included n=163 Austrian school teachers and n=53 Austrian university students. 67 percent of the school teachers were female, 33 percent were males. The school teachers' ages range from 22 to 59 years with an average of 40 years. 34 percent of the teachers worked at primary schools, 18 percent at secondary schools, 25 percent at high schools, and about 6 percent at other schools (e.g., for handicapped students). Teachers were asked to take part in the study when they left school, after public meetings (e.g., teacher-parents-meetings), or during private meetings (e.g., parties) by research assistants. The student sample consisted of 45 females and 8 males with an average age of 25 years. 31 students attended a course in statistics and 22 students a course in instructional systems design at a department of educational research.

Instrumentation

Both, teachers and students had to answer a questionnaire including the following issues:

General importance of emotions during instruction. Teachers and students were asked to select one of the seven items depicted in Table 1. The items were ranked on a dimension from low ("emotions are not important ...") to high ("emotions are more important than anything else ...") importance.

Different types of emotions. The question "Which students' emotions should teachers consider during instruction?" was presented to teachers. Students were asked about which of their emotions should be coped with by the course instructor. Both, teachers and students were requested to state at least five different types of emotions.

FEASP-strategies. Short descriptions of the FEASP-strategies as depicted in Table 3 were used in teachers' and students' questionnaires. Teachers were also asked to estimate the importance of the FEASP-strategies for their daily instruction ("I use the strategy often, seldom, or never"). Students were asked, how often the FEASP-strategies were used in the course they were attending within the last two weeks (with the answer alternatives "never", "1-3 times", "4-6 times", "7-10 times", or "more than 10 times"). The number of items and the reliability coefficients (Consistency, Cronbach's Alpha) of the different sub-scales are shown in Table 4.