EMOTIONS OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN THE USE OF DIGITAL PORTFOLIOS AS A TOOL OF LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT

The work that is presented here is a part of an innovation project carried out for a teaching team from University of Granada. The main objective of this project was the integration of new strategies of learning and assessment in Higher Education as the e-portfolio in a blended-learning environment. The project was developed for two academic years (from 2012 to 2014), and it was funded by the Vicerectorate for quality assurance of the University of Granada. This paper is focused on one of the issues that has revealed lately as an important key in the learning and teaching processes: the emotional dimension. In order to do this, the emotions that students feel in the production of a digital portfolio in a virtual learning environment, are studied. The objectives are focused in analyzing the emotions that university students show with a didactic strategy based on the use of digital portfolios. The methodological approach used to reach these objectives has been the quantitative perspective. The instrument used for the data collection was a questionnaire elaborated by the team and tested by means of proofs of construct and content validity. The selected sample in this study is formed by 358 students participating in ten different courses of different degrees from the University of Granada. Regarding the main results obtained from the descriptive statistics analysis, we have to highlight more and most varied positives emotions than negative emotions related to online learning. Among the positive emotions, relief and joy are the most experienced by students during the learning activities in virtual environments. On the other hand, the most experienced negative emotions are worry-stress and confusion-disorientation. In this regard, we consider that emotions affect intrinsic motivation for learning, based on interest and curiosity. Emotions also affect extrinsic motivation related to the achievement of positive results (for example, good grades) or the prevention of negative results.