Better Mood, Better Learning

A study recently published in Psychological Science suggests, unsurprisingly, that people in a happier mood (after listening to peppy music or watching a funny video of a baby) perform better on tests that asked them to classify stimuli from rule-described categories. Positive moods also had a beneficial effect on strategy selection. According to the journalist take on the study, creativity is enhanced by watching viral videos, which may be why workers are so prone to dash off to YouTube land so regularly while at work… The researchers actually made use of YouTube videos for the study, but I think the implications of this go much deeper. Interest (Hidi & Ainley, 2008) and mood are important for learning. They are important for motivation and they seem to have an effect on cognitive processing. The results of this research may point to one of the reasons that people rate their learning higher in entertaining classrooms.

This paper was a product of the Catagorization Lab (Mindalab) at my old alma mater the University of Western Ontario. Some of their other interesting papers can be found here.

January 4th 2011 update:  Another  paper mentioned in the year-end issue of the Economist, showed similar effects. Oswald, Proto and Sgroi (2010) (available online via Andrew Oswald’s  page) showed both the positive effects of positive affect and the negative effects of being sad or depressed. The positive affect boost to productivity was 12%.

March 2013 update: More and more I keep running across articles on positive affect and learning. Here is a nice one I saw recently that not only explains why it is important, but gives some practical advice for creating a better, more positive community in the classroom. The four essentials that Ms. Alber lists are well worth putting into practice.

Another March 2013 update: Here is a nice blog post titled Emotions and Humor in Learning and Memory. It does a nice job explaining why some learners really benefit from increased use of humor and affect in lessons, and it links to lots of resources.

 

Nadler, R.T., Rabi, R., & Minda, J.P. (2010). Better mood and better performance: learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science, 21 (12).

Self-organizing Systems of Education

This video from the ALT-C conference in Nottingham in 2010 shows Sugata Mitra talking about his experiments with self-organizing learning systems , that is, students in small groups doing self-directed learning with computers.  His speculation at the end is interesting: “education is a self-organizing system and learning is emergent.”

For some reason this blog is not allowing me to embed the video, but you can find it here.

Questions come to mind immediately. Would it work in an affluent society with a strong cultural leaning toward teacher-centered education? Would it work with language learning? And would any administration ever be willing to take a chance and try something like this?