The importance of Bloom’s affective domain in undergraduate ecology course performance

Background/Question/Methods

Undergraduate ecology courses often emphasize cognitive learning (e.g. knowledge, understanding and synthesis) over affective learning (e.g. attitudes, anxiety and motivation).  However, cognitive learning and course performance may be strongly impacted by student affect.  Not surprisingly, the few studies to consider student affect in a university setting support the importance of affect in cognitive learning outcomes.  However it may be challenging for faculty members, many of whom have little formal pedagogical training, to address each affective measure and also accomplish their cognitive learning objectives.  So given our limitations, which affective measure most impacts course performance in university ecology courses?  This study considers the effects of intelligence, class standing, gender, and major on affective measures and then considers the impacts of affective measures on course performance.  Data for this study were collected in ecology courses across three universities in the Connecticut State University (CSU) system over a two year period.  Students completed 88-question survey instruments verified to measure science anxiety, general anxiety, attitudes toward biology, and motivation.  Students consented to allow use of incoming SAT scores (correlates with intelligence, r²=0.86) and other demographic information collected from university registrars.  This analysis was done in an exploratory process using structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results/Conclusions

Our data show a robust support for our model (X²=251.4, df=21, p<0.001).  Intelligence had a negative effect on science anxiety (R²=-0.18, p=0.026) and a positive effect on course performance (R²=0.14, p=0.044).  Science anxiety did not decrease as students went through the CSU system (p>0.05), but general anxiety did (R²=-0.24, p=0.003).  Female students did not have higher levels of science anxiety (p>0.05), indicating increasing sexual equality in science anxiety.  Science majors had less science anxiety than non-science majors (R²=-0.03, p=0.015).  Non-science majors also had more negative attitudes toward biology (R²=-0.52, p<0.001) and less motivation to learn biology (R²=-0.50, p<0.001).  As for the effects of affective measures on course performance, general anxiety decreased (R²=-0.42, p<0.001) and higher motivation increased (R²=0.15, p=0.034) course performance.  However we did not observe any effect of attitude toward biology on course performance (p>0.05) and science anxiety actually increased course performance (R²=0.33, p<0.001).  Therefore our preliminary results suggest that lowering general anxiety may most strongly affect learning outcomes.  To our knowledge, this is the first study to consider all of these affective measures in one study at any educational level and therefore the first study to consider the relative effects of each of these measures on course performance.