Teachers’ emotions can make or break student learning

 

Joy sparks better learning, while anger shuts students down, study says

Teachers’ emotions in the classroom play a critical role in how students learn, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.  

When teachers experience enjoyment, they deliver higher-quality instruction that boosts students’ confidence in their abilities, interest and academic performance, while teacher anger is linked to poorer teaching and worse student outcomes. 

“We decided to conduct this research because teaching is not only an intellectual activity but also an emotional one,” said lead author Marina Elena Pfeifer, PhD, of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. “We wanted to understand this full chain of events connecting how a teacher feels to how a student performs.” 

The study, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, analyzed data from 679 mathematics teachers and more than 17,500 students across eight countries: Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Spain and the United Kingdom. During the study, students studied the same math lesson, which allowed researchers to fairly compare classrooms across different countries. 

Teachers reported their levels of enjoyment and anger, while students rated their teachers’ teaching quality, reported their own confidence and interest in the subject and completed a performance test. Researchers focused on three key aspects of teaching quality: classroom management, supportive teacher-student relationships and cognitive activation, which involves encouraging students to think critically. 

“We hypothesized that a teacher’s emotions act as a domino effect in the classroom, linking to student outcomes indirectly through the quality of their instruction,” Pfeifer said. 

The findings supported that hypothesis. Teachers who reported greater enjoyment were more likely to manage classrooms effectively, build supportive relationships with students and use cognitively engaging teaching strategies. These teaching practices, in turn, were associated with higher student confidence in their abilities, greater interest in learning and improved test performance. In contrast, teachers who reported more anger showed lower levels of teaching quality across all three areas and were associated with less favorable student outcomes. 

“In one sense, the findings were not entirely surprising because theory and previous smaller-scale studies had suggested that teacher emotions matter for teaching and learning,” Pfeifer said. “What was especially striking, however, was that these findings could now be shown on a large scale, with a highly culturally diverse teacher sample.” 

The researchers also identified a counterintuitive finding: More supportive teacher-student relationships were sometimes linked to lower student performance. Pfeifer suggested this may reflect teachers providing more emotional support when students are struggling academically. 

“The most fascinating part for me was the cross-cultural similarity of our findings,” Pfeifer said. “Despite considerable cultural, economic and linguistic differences, the mechanisms by which a teacher’s emotions shape teaching quality and student outcomes remained remarkably similar across the globe.” 

The findings highlight the importance of supporting teachers’ emotional well-being as part of improving education systems. 

“Our study shows that a teacher’s emotions are not merely a byproduct of the educational process, but an active contributor to it,” Pfeifer said. “The major real-world implication is that supporting a teacher’s emotional well-being is not just a ‘nice-to-have’—it is critical to student success.” 

The researchers suggest that schools and policymakers should prioritize reducing teacher stress and providing tools such as mindfulness-based interventions to help educators regulate their emotions. 

“Our findings suggest that teachers can easily get caught in powerful, self-feeding emotional-behavioral cycles,” Pfeifer said. “An angry teacher might struggle to manage the class effectively, leading to poor student performance, which in turn makes the teacher feel even more frustrated and unsuccessful—a vicious cycle. Conversely, a joyful teacher creates a virtuous cycle in which effective teaching leads to student success, which makes the teacher even happier and prouder of their work.” 

Article: “Linking Teacher Emotions, Teaching Quality Indicators, and Student Outcomes in Mathematics: Results from OECD’s Global Teaching InSights Study,” by Marina Elena Pfeifer, PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Oliver Lüdtke, PhD, Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education; Uta Klusmann, PhD, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; and Anne C. Frenzel, PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Journal of Educational Psychology, published online June 1, 2026. 

National biology learning objectives/assessment questions overlook connection to society

Is it a doctor's job to get the best outcomes for their patients or to tell the truth? What happens when these two things are not aligned? These are questions that students have to wrangle with in Introductory Biology. The goal, says Elli Theobald, UW assistant professor of biology, is to have students experience a more nuanced side of biology. There is not always one right answer, and issues of power and relationships often come into play.

Theobald aims to connect the biology concepts the students learn in class to real-world issues, something she hopes will help both retain students in the biology major at the UW and help non-majors in the class with their future careers.

Just how common is it for biology curricula to include real-world examples? One way to answer this question is to look at educational resources for biology instructors.

In a recent paper published in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research, Theobald and her team examined almost 3,000 science guidelines and assessment questions from 16 sources — including MCAT practice questions and questions from the Washington Comprehensive Assessment of Science and AP biology tests — for any connections to society. Of the approximately 200 elements — about 7% — that had real-world implications, many discussed ethics and public health issues.

UW News spoke with Theobald; lead author Carly Busch, UW postdoctoral fellow in biology; and co-author Madison Meuler, UW doctoral student in biology, to find out more about these results and what they mean for biology education today.

Why do you think so few learning objectives and assessment questions were connected to real-world examples?

Carly Busch: One reason is probably that there's a perception that real-world connections are not a part of the primary purpose of the course, that they only belong as an addendum or an aside.

This perception makes sense in some ways, given how departments and institutions have conceptualized biology and what biology undergraduate students expect to get out of a biology degree. But the lack of these connections to society was also remarkable, because I think they play a really important role in developing undergraduate students holistically and broadly as they continue on in their science careers. Real-world examples can support students' interest in science and help them develop their scientific identity.

Madison Meuler: I think there is also a belief of, "Oh well, this is an intro biology class. If this person is going to be a scientist, they'll get training in the societal stuff later." But I think there's value in having this type of information even in intro courses.

Students in these courses may or may not go on to major in biology, and may or may not pursue a career in STEM. But even if this is their only science course in college, what could they take away from it that can help them be an informed citizen in the world?

Science plays a huge role in politics and in a lot of decisions that affect people's day-to-day lives. It's a missed opportunity if you're not making those connections in the classroom. We want students, regardless of their future careers, to at least walk away being equipped with some skills to critically analyze the role that science is playing in society.

You found that roughly half of the questions that did mention society only vaguely referenced real-world scenarios. Can you give examples of implicit versus explicit mentions?

CB: So the most vague mention was from the American Association of Immunologists' recommendations for an undergraduate immunology course. This is one of the advanced subtopics that they list: the implications of Emil Von Behring's discovery of diphtheria antitoxin. We coded it as a vague mention because some of those implications could be related to society, not only focused on scientific experiments.

An example of explicit incorporation is from the bioinformatics core competencies. It asks students to explain the implications, good and bad, of being able to walk into a doctor's office and have your genome sequenced and analyzed, or of being able to obtain genetic information from direct-to-consumer testing services. There we have a very clear example of students being asked to think about how the science concept fits in with society.

Do you think that connecting science to society can help retain students in science?

CB: We haven't tested this yet, but based on prior research, there is reason to believe that incorporating these connections is going to help students be more engaged in what they're learning in class. Engagement is closely tied to students' performance outcomes, which often make or break their decision to persist in a major.

There is also a theory that helping students apply what they're learning in the classroom to things happening in their lives and in their communities really sets them up to be lifelong learners and engaged citizens.

This is something I am excited to study in the future — to understand how making these connections expands students' perceptions of what science is and who does science. The types of research questions that most scientists ask are on topics they personally are interested in. Maybe they study wildflowers in Washington because they love hiking, and they've always been struck by how beautiful the flowers are. That's the beauty of being an academic researcher: You get to explore all of the different things that you're curious about.

MM: Connecting content to real-world experiences could also increase retention by helping students feel a sense of belonging in the classroom. You're far less likely to persist in a class if you feel like you don't belong in that physical space, right? The course content definitely plays a role in that.

I think that making these connections between content and societal issues could help students start thinking things like, "Oh, this is a thing I care about, how could I design a study that could provide evidence to help inform a policy decision?"

Elli Theobald: Students have said to me, "I don't want to be a scientist because I want to help people." And that's a problem. If we're teaching science in a way that makes it feel like it isn't helping people, then we're doing something wrong. It's just such a huge disservice to biology because we'll lose so many amazing and capable students who could push our field forward.

This study looked at biology education resources. Do you know if biology instructors are already incorporating more real-world connections in their courses?

CB: If instructors aren't getting support but they're still making these connections in the classroom, it's because they are putting that onus on themselves and choosing to add it. I applaud all instructors who are making these connections, and I fully expect that more connections are being made than what we have found in textbooks and in these resources. We are currently collecting actual course materials from intro bio courses to see where instructors are making these connections.

But I also think that it would be such a valuable resource for instructors to have more support in making those connections. Here's where I think really bolstering the amount of resources for instructors could provide more scaffolding for instructors to be able to provide a variety of connections, or to even recognize opportunities to make these connections in the course objectives. One of my hopes for this work is that it helps to provide motivation for those sorts of materials.

Factors associated with grade 9 math success

Success in grade 9 math is an important milestone in students’ transition to high school and a key indicator of whether they are on track for graduation. In Denver Public Schools (DPS), district leaders are working to increase the number of students who make this transition successfully. To inform these efforts, this Regional Educational Laboratory Central study identified the student characteristics and experiences that were strongly associated with passing grade 9 math and whether those associations differed for student groups that might be at greater risk during the transition to high school. Key findings Higher likelihood of passing grade 9 math among DPS students who attended a high school with above-average Hispanic enrollment, had higher middle school attendance, and met proficiency benchmarks on middle school English language arts standardized exams. In most cases, these associations also held for student groups of interest. Lower likelihood of passing grade 9 math among DPS students who received any failing grade in a middle school math course, experienced any suspension in middle school, attended a high school with above-average enrollment of students eligible for the National School Lunch Program, and attended a high school that hosts a newcomer center. Experiencing a suspension in middle school had the strongest association with grade 9 math success. Read the full report: https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/resource-library/report/descriptive-study/factors-associated-grade-9-math-success-denver-public-schools

 

College students feel more pressure to be perfect than they did a generation ago

 College students feel more pressure to be perfect than they did a generation ago, finds research published by the American Psychological Association. That increase in perfectionism may be tied to social and economic factors such as rising inequality and slowing economic growth, the researchers found.

“Perfectionism is a public health risk – it’s associated with increased depression and anxiety,” said lead author Thomas Curran, PhD, of the London School of Economics and Political Science. “If we want to tackle the youth mental health crisis, we need to focus on these cultural and economic factors.”

The research was published in Psychological Bulletin.

In previous research, Curran and his colleagues found rising rates of perfectionism in college students through 2017. In the current study, they wanted to see whether the rise had continued since then and explore the reasons behind it. They analyzed data from 307 studies conducted between 1989 and 2024, with a total of more than 82,000 American, Canadian and British college students. All of the studies asked the students to rate themselves using one of two standard scales of perfectionism.

Overall, the researchers found increasing rates of self-reported perfectionism between 1989 and 2024. They also found that since the early 2000s, different aspects of perfectionism had increased at different rates: “Perfectionistic concerns” (fear of failure, indecisiveness, and fear of being negatively judged by others) increased much faster than “perfectionistic strivings” (the motivation to set extremely high standards and work hard to achieve them).  

The researchers also looked at how rates of perfectionism overlapped with economic conditions over time and across countries. They found that slowing GDP per capita was associated with higher rates of perfectionistic striving, while rising economic inequality was associated with steeper increases in perfectionistic concerns.

“When there’s a lack of economic opportunity, young people seem to compensate with striving,” Curran says. “And when inequality grows, what you see is that fear and worry about making mistakes and other people’s opinions starts to become a more central feature of young people’s psychology.”

The researchers also found that the link between perfectionism and mental health remained stable over time – higher levels of perfectionism were associated with mental health symptoms including depression and anxiety irrespective of time period. Since perfectionism has increased over time, the researchers say, it may be a factor in increased mental health concerns.

“These findings provide additional context for recent debates about youth mental health,” Curran says. “Phones and social media have received a lot of the blame, but the rise in perfectionism predates social media. This research study suggests something deeper is at work.”

Article: “Perfectionism is accelerating over time: A cross-temporal meta-analytic review of 35 years of college student data,” by Thomas Curran, PhD, and Pia Marie Pose, PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Andrew Hill, PhD, York St. John University. Psychological Bulletin, published May 28, 2026. 

Youth with mental health and neurodevelopmental issues: Negative online experiences are common

 

New Child Mind Institute study finds more than one in four youth experienced a negative online experience in the past year, yet only one in five reported the incident through platform tools

A new study from researchers at the Child Mind Institute finds that negative online experiences are common among children and adolescents with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions, and that most incidents are not reported through platform reporting tools.

Published in JAACAP Open, the study examined negative online experiences among 1,009 youth ages 9 to 15 with a history of mental health or neurodevelopmental concerns, all of whom were current or previous participants in the Child Mind Institute’s Healthy Brain Network. More than one in four reported at least one negative online experience in the past year. Among those who had such an experience, nearly 69% reported multiple incidents, yet only 20% reported the incident through platform reporting tools.

The study defined “negative online experiences” as any unwanted or uncomfortable experiences while online, including cyberbullying, cyberstalking, doxxing, impersonation, sexual harassment, and related forms of digital harm. The research used a mixed-methods design, combining a quantitative survey with an in-depth qualitative follow-up involving a three-day moderated online bulletin board with a subset of participants.

“These findings point to a large and often hidden problem,” said Michael P. Milham, MD, PhD, Chief Science Officer at the Child Mind Institute and senior author of the study. “Many young people are encountering harmful or uncomfortable experiences online, but the systems designed to help them often do not receive a report. That creates a major gap for parents, educators, clinicians, and platforms trying to keep children safer online.”

The research team identified three major categories of barriers that prevent youth from reporting negative online experiences: reporting process barriers, such as not knowing how to make a report; reporting policy barriers, including uncertainty about what qualifies for reporting or how platform rules apply; and emotional barriers, such as embarrassment, fear, and worry about consequences, or lack of confidence that support will be helpful.

The study also found that reporting decisions were often shaped by how young people interpreted the incident itself. In the qualitative follow-up, youth considered whether the harmful behavior seemed intentional, how malicious it appeared, and how severe or repeated the harassment was. When those cues were ambiguous, youth were less certain about whether reporting was appropriate.

“Reporting is not simply a matter of telling young people to speak up,” said Mirelle Kass, lead author of the study. “Youth are making complicated judgments about intent, severity, platform rules, and the possible consequences of disclosure. If we want young people to report harmful experiences, the tools and systems around them need to be clearer, safer, and easier to use.”

The findings suggest that online safety efforts should be tailored to the needs of youth who may already be managing mental health, developmental, or social challenges. Social aptitude, mental health symptoms, and parenting style were associated with youths’ likelihood of encountering negative online experiences and with the barriers they faced when deciding whether to report them.
Participants also expressed a clear desire for better tools and guidance. Most youth wanted platforms to provide more information about how to protect themselves online, how to use safety features such as blocking and reporting, and how to access support during and after the reporting process.

“Families, educators, clinicians, policymakers, and technology developers all have a role to play,” said Dr. Milham. “We need reporting systems that children can understand, policies that are transparent, and trusted adults who can respond without blame or overreaction. Safer digital spaces will require more than awareness. They will require systems designed around how young people actually experience online harm.”
The study underscores the importance of developmentally appropriate safety tools, clearer platform policies, and stronger support systems for youth navigating digital spaces. For children and adolescents with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions, improving reporting pathways may be an important step toward reducing hidden online harms and building safer online environments.

Social media bans for teenagers lack evidence and pose risks

 

In December 2025, Australia banned young people under 16 from having social media accounts. France, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Malaysia, Norway, India, Egypt, Canada, Türkiye, and the United Kingdom are hot on their heels. French president Emmanuel Macron said, “Banning social media for those under 15: this is what scientists recommend.” American senator Brian Schatz, author of the Kids Off Social Media Act, said, “Studies have revealed that when children and teens reduce or eliminate exposure to social media for longer than a month, their mental health benefits.” Proponents of youth social media bans claim that we have strong scientific evidence showing that bans will improve teenagers’ wellbeing. 

As a clinical psychologist and parent, I would be thrilled if this were true, but it is not. We do not know how social media bans will affect youth because we have never studied that question. Let me explain.

Searching for evidence

When we want to test claims like ‘banning social media improves youth wellbeing’, scientific experiments are one of our most powerful tools to figure out what is causing something to happen. In experiments testing the effects of social media restriction on wellbeing, we randomly assign people to at least two groups: one quits using social media for a period of time and the other is the control or comparison group, which continues to use social media as usual. Given the strength of ban proponents’ claims, my co-authors and I were curious to know how strong the experimental evidence supporting their position was. In our new study, we collected and reviewed all of the experiments that have tested whether social media restriction improves wellbeing, and we were shocked by what we found.

Not a single social media restriction experiment has included people under the age of 16. We do not know how social media bans will affect the young people being targeted by them because we have never tested this with them! 

To be fair, sometimes strong evidence in adults warrants making the leap to apply the same conclusions to teenagers. But even that leap is not justified here. The experiments with adults show weak, null, and mixed effects, with 40% of experimental studies showing harmful effects (eg, decreased life satisfaction and increased loneliness) or no effects of social media restriction. So even when adults are told repeatedly that social media is bad for their mental health and that giving it up will help, we find, on average, few to no benefits.

Unintended consequences?

There is also good reason to believe that bans may backfire. First, enforcing a youth social media ban raises major ethical concerns. Enforcement efforts invade people’s privacy and are likely to hurt marginalized people more. For example, the technology that determines age based on selfie uploads makes more mistakes with young faces and people of color. Banned youth may also miss out on important resources and communications provided via social media, as schools, clubs, and most other youth-serving organizations use social media as a main form of communication.

What happens when enforcement efforts fail? Many young people will circumvent bans by creating fraudulent ‘adult’ accounts or lurking anonymously. They will retain access to social media without any of the benefits of parental controls or content filters enabled by youth accounts. The vast majority of young people oppose youth social media bans, and teens are well known for their defiance of top-down edicts that disregard their needs. Expect more conflict between teens and caregivers, not less.

To recap, we don’t know how social media bans will affect teens, and the bans may backfire. Yet the bans are still happening! Like other policies that consume resources, political capital, and time, it is imperative for governments to evaluate these actions by funding comprehensive assessments of the bans’ impacts. 

What next?

The first step in measuring the impact of these bans is to determine if the bans actually change teenagers’ social media habits. Three months in, Australian authorities reported that close to 70% of social media accounts owned by people under 16 remained active. 

Second, we need a careful and well-resourced plan to measure both positive well-being and mental health problems from multiple sources, including self-report, caregiver report, and objective behavioral data, to get a full picture of whether and how altered social media use affects youth. 

Third, we need creative approaches to capture the real-world impacts of the bans, since true experiments are not possible and effects may be at the community as well as the individual level. For example, we could randomly assign a subset of youth (eg within a certain region) to delayed enactment of the ban. Whatever approach is taken, governments must collaborate with diverse stakeholders – including young people – to rigorously and openly evaluate potential impacts. Rushed or improvised assessment will leave room for politicization and motivated reasoning.

Big Tech has become infamous for ‘moving fast and breaking things’. Policymakers rushing to enact these bans risk repeating Big Tech’s mistakes and compounding the problems the bans are trying to solve. We cannot ban our way out of a youth mental health crisis. Rather than take things away, we should make things better.

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Journal

Frontiers in Developmental Psychology

DOI

10.3389/fdpys.2026.1805989 

As AI Transforms education, new article highlights the human dimensions of teaching

 

As artificial intelligence and digital technologies continue to reshape education, the role of teachers is becoming increasingly complex and demanding. A new article published in ECNU Review of Education (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20965311261421964) on May 13, 2026, by Andreas Schleicher of the OECD explores what constitutes quality teaching in the age of AI and argues that the future of education depends not only on technological advancement, but also on the human qualities of teachers.

Expectations for teachers have always been high and continue to grow. Teachers are expected to possess deep subject knowledge, understand diverse learners, and apply effective pedagogical strategies. Beyond these traditional responsibilities, they are also expected to respond to students' varied needs, promote inclusion and social cohesion, and foster collaborative learning environments. In addition, teachers today are increasingly expected to serve as role models for lifelong learning. Students are more likely to develop lifelong learning habits when they see their teachers continuously expanding their own knowledge and questioning existing ideas.

The article highlights how AI and digitalization have introduced new challenges for teachers. These include managing information overload, addressing issues such as plagiarism, and protecting students from online risks including fraud, privacy violations, and cyberbullying. Teachers are also expected to help students become critical users of digital technologies and informed consumers of online information. In this context, teaching extends far beyond academic instruction.

Looking ahead, the article presents AI as a powerful but neutral tool that could reshape educational opportunities. According to the author, AI has the potential to make learning more accessible and better tailored to individual learners' needs. It may also create more flexible learning pathways, allowing learners greater control over what, how, and when they learn. At the same time, however, the article stresses that AI is not inherently beneficial. It can amplify both effective and ineffective educational practices. AI may help reduce inequities in some contexts while reinforcing them in others. Although it can support inclusion through adaptive learning opportunities, it may also deepen existing inequalities, as seen during the pandemic. Similarly, AI can help teachers design innovative learning experiences, but it may also limit teacher autonomy by encouraging reliance on pre-set algorithms or scripted teaching methods.

A central argument of the article is that human capacities remain essential in education, particularly in areas where technology has clear limitations. Teachers need strong social and emotional competencies to effectively support students. The author notes that many people attribute their success to teachers who provided emotional support, showed genuine care, or served as role models. These dimensions of teaching are difficult to measure, yet they are fundamental to student development and well-being.

In addition to emotional competence, teachers need professional judgment to navigate the complexities of classroom practice. Classrooms are described as dynamic environments shaped by diverse learners, limited resources, and unpredictable challenges. Teachers must therefore combine subject knowledge and pedagogical expertise with adaptability, creativity, and responsiveness.

In this sense, teaching is portrayed as both a science and an art. On the one hand, effective teaching draws on research-based knowledge of learning processes and pedagogical strategies. On the other hand, it requires adaptability, creativity, and sensitivity to the unique needs of each classroom. Teachers must constantly make complex decisions in dynamic and often unpredictable environments, balancing curriculum demands with students' individual differences and emotional needs.

Ultimately, the article concludes that the future of teaching lies in preserving the human dimensions of education while thoughtfully integrating technological advances. Teachers are encouraged to act as designers of learning experiences, critical guides in a digital world, and role models for students. By balancing technological innovation with human judgment and empathy, teachers can support meaningful and equitable learning in an increasingly digital society.

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Journal

ECNU Review of Education

DOI

10.1177/20965311261421964