The Impact Of Feedback On Academic Achievement: The Mediating Role Of Academic Emotion

Feedback, defined as’information provided by an agent regarding aspects of one’s performance or understanding’, has been identified as one of the most powerful influences on the learning process. Academic emotions refer to all emotions associated with students’ academic process during teaching and learning. Academic emotions influence students’ academic performance through a variety of direct or indirect ways. Pekrun’s control-value theory hold that feedback is one of the environment variables influencing academic emotions. Previous studies on the relation of the three variables was scarce, and the effect of feedback on emotions and academic performance was unclear. So in this research, we will explore the relationship between feedback, academic emotions, and academic performance. Besides, an experiment is designed to investigate the effect of different types of feedback on subjects’emotions and the performance of working memory tasks.This study is divided into two parts, part one is a survey research. The subjects are 809 junior high school students, and they fill out the "academic feedback questionnaire" and "Academic emotion questionnaire of teenagers" to understand the basic situation of feedback and academic emotions students perceived. The results are as follows:1.Feedback score exists significant gender differences that boy students negative feedback score is much higher than girl students; differences exist among different grade groups. high grade group students’ positive feedback, effective feedback scores are significantly higher than medium group, and medium group scores are significantly higher than low grade group. high grade group students’ negative feedback scores are significantly lower than medium group, and medium group scores are significantly lower than low grade group. There is no difference between complex feedback in three groups.2. On the dimension of academic emotions, the positive high arousal, positive low arousal emotions exist significant gender differences, and boys score much more than girls, negative academic emotions exist no significant gender differences; Different grade groups has significant differences on the score of positive low arousal, negative high arousal, negative low arousal academic emotions.3. Complicate feedback and negative low arousal emotions is significantly negatively correlated; positive feedback is significantly positively correlated with positive academic emotions, is significantly negatively correlated with negative academic emotions, and is significantly positively correlated with academic performance; negative feedback is significantly negatively correlated with positive low arousal academic emotions, is significantly positively correlated with negative academic emotions, and is significantly negatively correlated with academic performance; effective feedback is significantly positively correlated with positive low arousal academic emotions, is significantly negatively correlated with negative academic emotions, and is significantly positively correlated with academic performance.4. Positive low arousal academic emotions has a remarkable mediation effect between positive feedback, negative feedback, effective feedback and academic achievement.Part two is an experiment research. With different ways of feedback as independent variable, emotions and working memory tasks as dependent variables, a mixed experiment is designed to explore the influence of feedback to students’ emotions and working memory. The results are as follows:1.Positive feedback group’s scores of positive emotions are notably higher than negative feedback group, and negative emotions scores are significantly lower than negative group.2.Positive feedback group’s number of correct answers of the working memory is dramatically more than negative feedback group, and reaction time of the working memory task is significantly shorter than negative feedback group.