Unpacking Students’ Emotional Experience in the Connecting Assessment of Blended Learning Context

Emotional experiences significantly affect students’ health, learning outcomes, productivity, and social interactions. Therefore, investigating learners’ emotional experiences in typical technology-related scenarios during the information age is crucial and meaningful. Utilizing assessment to bridge online and offline activities serves as a critical element in ensuring the success of blended learning and has become a widespread practice. This practice often elicits unique and intense emotional responses from learners. Yet, there is a paucity of research examining these emotional experiences. The present study aims to fill this gap by establishing a typical blended learning context (two periods of online learning alternating with two periods of face-to-face instruction) in a Chinese university and investigating the emotional experiences within the connecting assessment context through the administration of questionnaires and interviews. Analysis of the data reveals that during the process of connecting assessment, learners tend to exhibit more pronounced negative emotions as compared to other educational situations. Specifically, feelings of relief, anxiety, and pride emerged as having the highest mean values. Moreover, there is a remarkable difference in emotional experiences across different levels of academic achievement. Participants also identified several contributing factors to their emotional responses, such as the level of preparedness, the sense of accomplishment, the motivational function of assessment, and constraints on time. This study underscores the intricate nature of emotions within academic contexts and posits that certain established definitions of emotions may be contingent upon specific contextual factors.