ings between the studies may have had more to do with the types of tasks
and processing of the information than students’ motivation or willingness
to engage. This similarity across studies in terms of engagement but discrep-
ancy in terms of learning and performance needs to be more closely exam-
ined in future research.
Given the discrepancy in our work and some of the methodological limi-
tations, it is important to consider other work on the relation between stu-
dents’ affect and learning in mathematics. Although there is not extensive
research in this area, a few studies are relevant. For instance, Bryan and
Bryan (1991) conducted a series of studies with upper elementary students
with and without learning disabilities. They induced half of the students
into a positive mood and half received no mood induction. Students were
then asked to work on 50 subtraction and addition problems for 5 minutes.
They found that students in a positive mood completed more problems cor-
rectly than students in the neutral mood. There was, however, no significant
difference in the number of problems completed between the positive mood
group and the control group. The authors replicated the first study with ju-
nior and senior high school students and found a similar pattern of results.
Thus, the results from this study suggest that positive mood is beneficial for
mathematics performance, at least in terms of computation. However, in a
similar study, Yasutake and Bryan (1995) induced middle school students
into a positive mood versus a neutral mood and asked them to complete a
mathematics calculation subtest of the Woodcock–Johnson battery for 15
minutes. They found no significant effect of the mood condition on stu-
dents’ performance. Thus, the findings from the Bryan and Bryan (1991)
study were not replicated, suggesting that the pattern linking positive affect
to computation is not entirely consistent or may vary based on the length of
the study (5 vs. 15 minutes).
Two studies also examined middle students’ learning of shapes and sym-
bols. While these tasks are not directly related to mathematics computation,
they seem relevant in terms of understanding geometry and are therefore dis-
cussed here. In the same study described previously, Yasutake and Bryan
(1995) compared middle school students’ performance, working under a
positive versus neutral mood condition, on a 2-minute task in which they
needed to learn combinations of symbols and shapes and then make associ-
ations (Coding subtest from the Performance section of the WISC-R). The
authors found that students in the positive mood condition outperformed
students in the neutral mood condition. Masters, Barden, and Ford (1979)
conducted a similar study examining how 4-year-old children performed on
a shape discrimination task under three different mood conditions (posi-
tive, neutral, negative) and two different activation levels (active, passive).
Children worked on the shape discrimination task until it was mastered (they
could attempt up to 10 trial blocks consisting of 12 problems each). Pre-
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