Programming is a complex learning activity that involves coordination of cognitive processes and affective states. These aspects are often considered individually in computing education research, demonstrating limited understanding of how and when students learn best. This issue confines researchers to contextualize evidence-driven outcomes when…

A model is proposed that relates the personality dimensions of introversion-extraversion, achievement motivation, and anxiety to efficient cognitive performance. This general information-processing model also accounts for the systematic effects of motivational states on sustained information transfer and some aspects of short-term memory.…

This study examined whether particular strategies would enhance affective arousal and if these techniques would affect warm-up decrement during performance of a sport skill. One strategy eliminated warm-up decrement and two had no effect. Positive and negative arousal and the correlation of arousal level to warm-up decrement are explored.…

Measured arousal and motor responses as a function of conflict type and field structure. Using paper-and-pencil fields, subjects performed under four conflict conditions and a control condition. Arousal increased significantly with increasing conflict complexity and was habitual over repeated trials, though arousal did not differentiate field…

The contribution of individual differences in physiological arousal to intellective assessment in 29 junior high school learning disabled children was studied. (Author/PHR)

Finds that extraverted children did better than introverted children on both a nonverbal coding task and simple and complex verbal fluency tasks. Notes that anxiety influenced girls' performances on the more complex verbal fluency task, but did not alter boys' performances. Compares these findings to those of similar studies of adults. (RL)

Twenty elementary-grade boys with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and 20 nondisabled boys worked on an arithmetic task during either high stimulation (music), low stimulation (speech), and no stimulation (silence). Although nondisabled children performed similarly under all three auditory conditions, the children with ADHD did somewhat…

This document reports on research on the effects which the presence of other individuals have on another individual's performance. The experiment was conducted as follows: Selected male and female subjects were given the task of following a blind maze with a stylus. They were tested in performance under three different circumstances, alone, with a…

High, neutral, and low statements of success expectancy were paired with positive and negative success feedback statements in a reading comprehension experiment. Incongruent combinations such as high success expectancy--negative feedback produced higher comprehension than congruent combinations. Results were interpreted by arousal and attribution…

Following a traditional learned helplessness paradigm, subjects initially tried to terminate random bursts of noise using a button-pressing manipulandum and next tried to solve 20 serially-presented anagrams. The noise was broadcast at either a loud or soft intensity, and the subject's button-pressing was either successful (Escape condition) or…

The relationship between teachers' statements about classroom tasks and the degree of subsequent student engagement were studied to test the influence of teachers' expectations. Task presentation statements made by teachers in 6 reading and mathematics classes for the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were classified according to 18 categories of…

Children in open and traditional classrooms were observed and tested on physiological and performance measures. The children were categorized into subgroups according to their arousal level. Analyses of variance revealed that performance of high-arousal children in open classrooms decreased over time in contrast to all other subgroups. (Author/AL)

Ninety-six high-achieving fourth graders performed a memory task before which either positive or negative expectancy statements were made by an adult and after which either positive or negative feedback statements were given. For high IQ children, performance was higher for discrepant combinations of expectancy-feedback. (Author/MH)

The effects of humorous test questions on test performance of high and low-anxious college students was investigated. It was hypothesized that humor should reduce the anxiety level of high-anxious subjects, and thus improve their performance, while having little effect on low-anxious subjects. Students were assigned to a low or high-anxious group…