What are the effects of your class on students' affect during the class activity? How about gains in Affective and/or Cognitive Cultural Competence?

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Please feel free to use our Pre-Post Survey (link to .pdf to the left to find out!

Please contact Emma E. Buchtel (buchtel@eduhk.hk) for more information and research applications.

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Method:

The brief survey is filled out before class starts, and again at the end. In our classes, we did this at the beginning and end of a single 3-hour class period.

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First, students read the Information and Consent Form.

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Before class started, they filled out a brief measure of Affective Cultural Competence (ACC; 5 items: Example: “I feel a sense of respect and sympathy for people from other cultures”) and Cognitive Cultural Competence (CCC; 3 items, e.g. “I know about the history and traditions of other cultures”).

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At the end of class, students indicated what kinds of emotions they had felt during the class, including Positive Emotional Engagement (average of 7 emotions), Sympathetic Emotions (average of 4 emotions), Epistemic Search Emotions (4 emotions), and Negative, Non-Epistemic Search Emotions (3 emotions).

 

Finally, students filled out the measures of ACC and CCC again. They were asked to estimate if their ACC had increased with the question “In general, would you say today’s class INCREASED your curiosity, interest, respect, and/or sympathy for people of other cultural backgrounds?”, and answered demographic questions.

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Results Summary, Quantitative Surveys of Students:

Here is a brief summary of our own results across our activities. We hope you have a similarly positive experience!

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Among the 255 students across 13 different activities and classes who filled in their post-class Time 2 surveys, they reported that the class activity had increased their curiosity, interest, respect, and/or sympathy for people of other cultural backgrounds a lot (21%), a moderate amount (49%), or a little (27%), with only 6 students (2.4%) saying “not at all.”

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Positive emotional engagement was on average high, while negative emotions were less experienced. On the 6-point scale, on average, students “Agreed (5)” that they experienced positive emotions (M = 4.8), and “Slightly agreed (4)” that they experienced sympathetic emotions (M = 4.3). They “slightly disagreed (3)” that they experienced Epistemic search emotions (M = 3.2) and “disagreed (2)” that they experienced negative emotions (M = 2.1).  This suggests that on average, teachers had implemented class activities that evoked positive emotions more than negative emotions.

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Finally, 211 students filled in both the pre-class and post-class survey. Overall, the 211 students didn't increase in their affective cultural competence (ACC) scores; however, by their own self-estimation, 97.6% of them said they had increased. This may be due to ceiling effects for the multi-item self-rating ACC survey: The average ACC score was already 4.9 out of 6, very close to the maximum, and so we were unable to measure much increase above that (average ACC was also 4.9 after the classes). But overall, we DID see increases in Cognitive Cultural Competence (CCC) which had an average of 4.1 before the class activities, and 4.4 after the class activities.  

 

Our key question was: Were the amount of emotions they felt during class associated with gains in both Affective and Cognitive Cultural Competence? The data gave a positive response. Overall (from all 211 students who filled out both Time 1 and Time 2 surveys, across 13 different activities and classes), we found that the more that students experienced "positive" or "sympathetic" emotions during the class period, they were more likely to INCREASE in both their "Cognitive cultural competence" and also "Affective cultural competence."  Negative emotions had a small NEGATIVE effect on affective cultural competence scores.

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Thus, in terms of effects on students, we can report that according to student reports, the pedagogical activities attempted by our teachers successfully raised students’ interest, curiosity, and respect for other cultures (by self-estimation), while also teaching them new knowledge about other cultures. The pedagogical activities were also successful in evoking affective engagement, especially positive emotions and sympathetic emotions. The final conclusion we can draw is that by aiming for affectively engaging pedagogical activities, especially those that evoke positive and sympathetic emotions, the teachers became more likely to positively influence both the affective and cognitive aspects of students’ Global Perspectives.

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Students left positive open-ended comments such as “Super Fun!!” “An interesting class, like it very much!:) Thank you very much (heart)” “     Wonderful, Can understand other Religions” and “The host is genuine and knowledgable and funny. Thanks for the great lecture and tour.” In addition to the positive influence on students’ global perspectives, these results also strongly supported the pedagogical framework linking global perspectives to affective pedagogical activities, and showing the strong links between cognition (knowledge) and affect in education.

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