📘 Full article (Open Access soon):
Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Emotions and Learning Self-Perceptions in Connection with Different Types of Instructional Approaches in the Context of Daytime Astronomy.
🔗 doi.org/10.1007/s111...

And yes—students reported significant gains in what they thought they learned in both subsequences.
Learning and emotions evolve together.

If you teach science, design curriculum, or research inquiry/model-based learning, this matters:
Models, inquiry tasks and explanation building produce distinct emotional landscapes.
Instructional design should consider them explicitly.

Our data suggest a new message for teacher education:
Instead of “removing” negative emotions, we should work with them.
A supportive learning climate transforms insecurity into curiosity, reflection and deeper learning.

finding #3:
Modelling triggered the strongest association between:
✨ interest
✨ concentration
✨ and learning self-perceptions
Meaning: abstraction and explanatory reasoning are emotionally engaging when supported properly.

finding #2:
“Insecurity” was NOT negative.
It acted as a productive epistemic emotion.
It peaked in the moments when students confronted their initial ideas or refined their models.
Learning requires uncertainty.

finding #1:
Students experienced different emotions depending on the epistemic nature of the tasks:
🔎 Inquiry → insecurity + embarrassment
🧠 Modelling → interest + concentration + satisfaction
Same content, different emotional impact.

The setting:
132 pre-service primary teachers engaged in Model-Based Inquiry (MBI) during a long teaching sequence on Daytime Astronomy:
☀️ Why do daylight hours change?
🌍 How do Sun-Earth models explain and predict it?
Two subsequences: Inquiry + Modelling.

Why emotions?

We wanted to understand how inquiry vs modelling trigger different emotional profiles during authentic science practices.