The effects of teacher enthusiasm on student motivation, selective attention, and text memory

The purpose of the present study was to examine the cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying the effects of teacher enthusiasm. In order to determine why and how teacher enthusiasm facilitates learning, hypotheses about three alternative processes were tested, namely motivation, attention, and memory encoding. The present study was a laboratory experiment conducted in a "simulated" classroom using videotaped lectures. Three hundred introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions, namely Low Enthusiasm, High Enthusiasm/Strategic, High Enthusiasm/Random, and High Enthusiasm/Uniform. The Low Enthusiasm condition contained few if any enthusiastic teaching behaviors. The High Enthusiasm/Strategic condition contained high levels of enthusiastic teaching behaviors, and these low-inference behaviors were coordinated with the topic structure of the lesson. The High Enthusiasm/Random condition also included frequent use of enthusiastic behaviors, but these behaviors sometimes did and sometimes did not coincide with the topic structure of the lesson. The High Enthusiasm/Uniform condition featured frequent use of enthusiastic teaching behaviors, but their occurrence remained constant at all points throughout the lecture.;The motivation model of teacher enthusiasm predicted that student learning and motivation for further learning, as measured by (1) a questionnaire and (2) student demand for further reading on the lecture topic, would be higher in all three High Enthusiasm conditions (i.e., Strategic, Random, Uniform) than in the Low Enthusiasm condition. The attention model of teacher enthusiasm predicted that student learning and attention, as measured by (1) secondary task reaction time and (2) on-task behavior would be higher in the three High Enthusiasm conditions (i.e., Strategic, Random, Uniform) than in the Low Enthusiasm condition. The memory model predicted that student learning and memory encoding as measured by (1) overall recall, (2) topic access, (3) conditional recall, and (4) topic representation would be higher in the High Enthusiasm/Strategic condition than in the other three conditions (i.e., High Enthusiasm/Random, High Enthusiasm/Uniform, Low Enthusiasm).;MANOVA analyses and multiple comparison tests suggested that teacher enthusiasm produces significant effects on student motivation, student attention, and student memory encoding, as predicted by motivation, attention, memory models. The text memory model seemed to do a better job of accounting for the overall pattern of results obtained in this research than either the attention or motivation models. For one thing, only the memory model is able to account for the fact that student learning, as measured by the multiple-choice test, was significantly facilitated only when teacher enthusiasm was used strategically to emphasize important points in the lecture. Both the attention and motivation models predict, incorrectly, that student learning should have been facilitated by all three High Enthusiasm conditions. A second finding favoring the text memory model over the attention and motivation models is that in the multiple regression analyses, text memory was the only variable found to significantly mediate the relationship between teacher enthusiasm and student learning. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).