Individual Differences

People react emotionally to their own and others' performances, often in characteristic ways. Getting a grade of "B" in a course can produce devastation in an anxious student who expected an "A." Psychologists believe that the student's temperament interacts with expectations for the course grade to produce a negative emotional response.

Characteristic emotional reactions and certain qualities of temperament are examples of psychological processes that are affective. Affective processes include all feelings and responses, positive or negative, related to emotion-laden behavior, knowledge, or beliefs. Affect can alter perceptions of situations as well as outcomes of cognitive effort; it can also fuel, block, or terminate cognition and behavior.

Affective processes intertwine with aspects of motivation and volition. In educational situations, students' motivational beliefs and judgments of their own capabilities influence their intentions and plans. Thus students who see themselves as "not good at math" will prefer other subjects and struggle in math class. Conation, an ancient psychological concept whose dictionary definition refers to purposive striving, covers the range of motivational and volitional processes that human beings display. Motivational processes underlie the decision to pursue a goal; they are the wishes and desires that lead to intentions, in turn dictated by interest and experience. Volitional processes come into play after goals and intentions are formed; these processes reflect steps to implement goals, and ways of managing resources. Modern psychology has come to see motivation and volition as category labels for distinct conative processes.

In 1980 Ernest Hilgard wrote that the main agenda for modern scientific psychology ought to be to understand the processes underlying three central human functions–cognition (perception, memory, and the processing of information), affection, and conation. Indeed, since the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology in education has been peppered with programs of research on the qualities and characteristics of people that fit into one of these three functional categories. Intelligence, for example, is cognitive, impulsivity is affective, and self-concept is conative. Within conation, some well-studied processes influence commitments and are therefore considered motivational. One example is self-efficacy, a kind of personal capability belief. Other research examines processes that people use to protect commitments already formed–for example, self-monitoring and self-rewards. When these processes occur once a commitment is made, they are volitional.

As early as the mid-twentieth century, theories began to identify the range of variables within and between categories that could be measured validly and reliably in persons. But despite much progress up to and past Hilgard's writing in 1980, more effort is needed to explain how the triad of human functions works together at the process level. Moreover, this research agenda is virtually unknown to those outside psychology, and laypeople are frequently unaware of how psychologists use these terms.

For some purposes, affective and conative processes have proven to be so interconnected that it makes little sense even to psychologists to separate them. One group of researchers, the Stanford Aptitude Seminar, invented the hybrid term, affcon, to reflect this viewpoint. Given the complicated sociocultural context in which schooling takes place today, it is hard to dismiss the importance for educators, parents, and counselors of understanding how changes in affect can influence conation and vice versa: Both play central roles in the willingness to work and quality of effort invested by students in academics.

Three examples serve to illustrate how the interplay between academic-intellectual processes and affcon processes affects objectives of educational practitioners, decision makers, and students. The examples reflect current issues as well as persistent problems.

Cognitive Engagement

A school classroom is a social context offering many opportunities for students to be distracted from their work. At the same time, the organization of a classroom demands behavioral self-control. This paradoxical combination of opportunities and demands suggests the need for creative curricular experiences that engage students fully in classroom work, making them want to succeed. The concept of cognitive engagement is a prominent goal of classroom teaching, at virtually all levels of education.

Part of what new paradigms for instruction are about is providing teachers with a repertoire of strategies for promoting cognitive engagement. Modern education reform emphasizes success as its own reward, but encourages teachers to use other incentives to move students along. Activities and experiences grounded in students' own interests, and assignments that require meaningful discussion of topics and material, help to promote cognitive engagement. Also supported by empirical research are inquiry teaching methods that make thinking explicit, and uncover hidden assumptions in content ranging from narratives to persuasive arguments. Research on teaching conducted between 1970 and the early twenty-first century makes it clear that students tune out in tired models of conventional teaching, where students listen and teachers talk.

Knowledge about which reforms and strategies work in different situations has been informed by evaluations of educational programs. Frequently, these demonstrate the insufficiency of seeking direct impact on learning outcomes such as achievement scores. Rather, achievement improves as a result of tapping into the affcon responses of students as they engage in and with schoolwork.

Student Responsibility

A student who takes responsibility for learning is self-regulated and self-motivated, intentionally directing energy toward learning tasks. Self-starters have long reaped academic rewards. Research conducted between 1980 and the early twenty-first century has uncovered the attitudes, skills, and behavior that characterize self-regulated learners, and emphasized the important role played by self-regulation skills in schooling outcomes. Researchers have also designed programs to help weaker students acquire self-regulation knowledge and skills. Counselors and teachers can use such programs to teach students responsibility. Likewise, parents can model self-regulation and strategies for doing homework.

Self-regulation and personal responsibility involve affcon processes. Careful self-management is necessary when follow-through is in jeopardy; for example, when a student experiences boredom or perceives that a task will be difficult to perform. The effortful processes that mark volition come forward then, with the sense to "buckle down." Not all academic situations demand volitional control, however. In some activities in the curriculum, learning can seem to occur with no effort, almost automatically. When a person is in the affective state that Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi called "flow," there is no need to drain volitional reserves.

Astute teachers and parents will listen and watch closely for evidence of emotional stress in school children, and encourage the highly motivated to enjoy their time between work and play. Negative physiological as well as emotional changes can result from too much pressure on children in school. Although the ability to monitor and control emotions increases developmentally, some variation remains even among adults.

Adaptive Teaching

An increasingly diverse population of students leads teachers to differentiate curriculum and instruction. Some common differentiation strategies have proven ineffective from an academic standpoint; for example, teaching to the bottom third of the class. There are also well-documented negative social consequences to other differentiation strategies, most notably the common practices of tracking and retention in grades. To accommodate individual differences in students, a teacher must do only good.

Some types of cooperative work groups, formed to reflect the heterogeneity of students within classes, produce positive affcon outcomes: Students give and receive help from peers; they learn how to organize and manage due dates; the whole group incurs rewards when individuals contribute best efforts. But even effective grouping arrangements work best in short bursts of time; motivation and affect are buoyed by flexibility. In forming cooperative groups teachers should take into account students' affect and self-regulatory styles as well as their status characteristics and levels of achievement. The importance of considering the affcon profile of students has historically been left out of adaptive teaching discussions and decisions.

Another important point to make about adaptive teaching is that good teachers have always addressed students according to attitudinal and work styles. For any given task, what a student presents in the way of interest and attitude, as well as prior knowledge, often dictates a particular explanation, example, or suggestion for improvement. Different explanations, examples, and suggestions will reach students with other interests or markedly opposite styles of behavior. Moreover, teaching adaptively means shifting with the student's own development. Hence, the teacher's dictum of "If you can't reach them one way, then try another" comes into play. Adaptive teaching not only requires a teacher to circumvent observed student weaknesses, but also to capitalize on strengths. When a student is removed from conventional instruction for compensatory purposes, there ought to be simultaneous efforts to develop an aptitude for conventional instruction directly. It is, after all, to the regular classroom that many special program students eventually will return.

Despite the growing body of research on affective and conative processes in education, many programs remain disjointed, even when constructs overlap considerably. There are important theoretical issues still contested, including the need for distinctions between concepts as interrelated as motivation and volition, and the precise nature of the connections in Hilgard's trilogy of mental functions. Some highly regarded theorists, such as Richard Snow and Julius Kuhl, offer sophisticated and situated (context-dependent) models, models that suggest the need for new language as well as new methods of practical assessment and clinical treatment. As the twenty-first century continues, work will advance in these directions, ultimately producing entirely different ways of thinking about affect and conation in education.