Abstract
We investigated whether perceived teacher enjoyment of teaching predicted student achievement via students’ enjoyment across Eastern and Western contexts. Data came from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 focusing on the reading domain. The respondents were 84,017 adolescents (51% girls) with a mean age of 15.17 years old from both the West (US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand) and the East (Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, Taipei, Singapore, Japan, and Korea). The results show that perceived teachers’ teaching enjoyment and reading enjoyment predicted reading achievement in both the Western and Asian students. Perceived teacher enjoyment related to student enjoyment demonstrating emotional contagion, and the association between perceived teacher enjoyment and student achievement was mediated by student enjoyment. We did not find cross-cultural differences in the strength of emotional contagion demonstrating cross-cultural universality. Implications for education and cross-cultural research are discussed.
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Data Availability
The data and the measures we used are obtained through The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 and are available to the public.
Code Availability
We used SPSS 26 and MPlus 8.3 to analyze the data.
Notes
The students in Western English-speaking countries were from these four countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. The students in East Asian were from the following seven societies: Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei, Singapore, Japan, and Korea
In PISA 2018, socio-economic status (SES) was represented by ESCS (index of economic, social, and cultural status). ESCS contained students’ family background information such as parents’ education and occupation, family wealth, culture resources, et cetera (OECD, 2019). We tested gender differences across cultures. For English-speaking countries, there was a significant gender effect on enjoyment of reading: t(36036) = 42.37, p < .001, with girls (M = .07, SD =1.17) obtaining higher scores than boys (M = −.42, SD = 1.03). There was also a significant gender effect on reading achievement: t(36036) = 22.31, p < .001, with girls (M = 518.00, SD =98.53) obtaining higher scores than boys (M = 493.99, SD =105.75).
In the East, there was a significant gender effect on enjoyment of reading: t(47977) = 31.21, p < .001, with girls (M = .59, SD = .97) obtaining higher scores than boys (M = .31, SD = .99). There was also a significant gender effect on reading: t(47977) = 21.68, p < .001, with girls (M = 540.46, SD =95.54) obtaining higher scores than boys (M = 520.61, SD = 104.66).
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Funding
This work was supported by The Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning (Code: TP2018068) given to Professor Yuyang Cai.
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Xie, Q., King, R.B. & Cai, Y. Emotional contagion: A cross-cultural exploration of how teachers’ enjoyment facilitates achievement via students’ enjoyment. Curr Psychol 42, 15907–15910 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02878-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02878-6