Are your students happy?. The Effect of Positive Emotions on Cognitive Processes in Multimedia-Based Learning

By pairing learning situations with positive 4–tuples (by incorporating jokes and anecdotes, for instance) teachers can strategically program learning to be a positive experience. In the example given earlier in this section, the teacher who had her slow student learn braille bypassed any negative anchors that he may have associated with learning algebra visually. For some learners simply sitting in a classroom or looking at a blackboard is an automatic negative anchor. We have known people with excellent strategies for mathematics who, when presented with a "word problem" as opposed to an equation, don't access their most effective strategy, because they process problems in word form with a different strategy. A person in one of our workshops had taken beginning French a total of five times over a number of years, failing the tests each time. He was not a poor student and did well in his other classes. He kept taking French because he needed a foreign language to graduate, and he figured that surely, because he had taken it so many times before, he would eventually pass the class ...»