Emotional responses to reading tasks

Few studies of the affective domain in education capture the dynamic nature of emotional responses by focusing at the level of student responses to individual tasks. In this dissertation, I address this limitation by focusing on students' emotional responses during individual reading tasks. I combine self-report and physiological data and two reading tasks to examine what factors predict middle school students' appraisals of reading tasks and how their emotional responses during the tasks relate to their reading comprehension performance. My dissertation consists of three articles. In the first, I focus on the task characteristics that predict differences in students' appraisals of two reading tasks. I find that students adjust their appraisals of reading tasks based on their actual performance or their perceived performance on a previous, similar task. Students with higher real or perceived performance on the first task tended to find the later task less threatening. In addition, students who were more interested in the topic of the passage were less threatened by novel reading tasks, though this effect dissipated when the task was repeated. In the second article, I investigate the relationship between physiological responses during reading tasks and reading comprehension. I focus particularly on respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an indicator of parasympathetic nervous system activity that indexes the change in heart rate associated with respiration. Students who exhibited an initial decrease in RSA upon hearing the reading task instructions and then showed an increase in RSA when starting the reading task tended to have the highest reading comprehension when measured through a verbal retelling task.

In the third article, I present exploratory findings from a small sample of students with language-based learning disabilities. Students with learning disabilities tended to report greater perceived threat from the study at baseline and from the reading tasks than did their peers without learning disabilities, and they tended to have faster heart rates and lower parasympathetic activation than their peers at baseline. The relationship between RSA reactivity and reading comprehension paralleled the findings for students without disabilities, but RSA reactivity was more strongly related to performance for students with learning disabilities.