What is it about?
Students may experience surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration and boredom as they learn. The impact of these emotions on the process of becoming information literate is explored. Research indicates that there is an optimal level of confusion for learning, greater than no confusion but less than reaching a state of frustration.
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Why is it important?
Library anxiety has been explored in some depth by librarians beginning in the 1980s, but very little attention has been paid to the other emotions that may affect student learning.
Perspectives
The work on epistemic emotions by Reinhard Pekrun is very relevant to both reference services and library instruction. The large body of research on library anxiety should be revisited and replicated, only now by measuring the degree to which students experience surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration and boredom throughout the research process.
Steve Black
Colgate University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Insights from Educational Psychology Part 4: Academic Self-Concept and Emotions, The Reference Librarian, July 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02763877.2017.1349022.
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