Prioritizing emotion objects in making sense of student learning of socioscientific issues

Abstract

We advance the understanding of how student emotions relate to their learning of socioscientific issues (SSI). Studies have tended to examine how students' positive and negative emotions about an issue contribute to their learning. However, this approach overlooks the fact that students may have different emotions about different objects (i.e., stakeholders, phenomena, the status quo, and the future) within an issue. In this study, we examined students' patterns of emotion objects with respect to the extent of their conceptual change from a reductionist view to a systems view of obesity. Using a multiple case study design, we tracked the emotion objects of four purposefully selected university students, who demonstrated either significant change or minimal change in their view of obesity. Data were collected over a 12-week general education course on obesity and 6 months after the course, and included weekly reflective journals and delayed postcourse interviews. We found that students with different extents of conceptual change had distinguishable sets of emotion objects. For example, the emotion objects of students with significant conceptual change included obese people and the food industry. Furthermore, their emotions were more often moral in nature. These findings suggest that moral emotions are an integral part of SSI learning. We make two contributions to the literature. First, we identify the need to attend to and specify emotion objects as key variables in future research on emotions. In practice, teachers should consider strategies that help students attend to the emotion objects that matter for SSI learning. Second, we identify stakeholders as key emotion objects in SSI learning. The expression of moral emotions about stakeholders coincided with conceptual change to a systems view. This implies that future research and the practice of SSI learning should pay attention to students' moral emotions about stakeholders.