The school closures due to the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 pandemic have posed an enormous challenge for all entities that take part in our children’s education. By displacing learning from schools to home environments, the crisis poses a risk of emotional and motivational problems. Based on research regarding the role of peers, learning in groups, school belonging, and educational equity, we explored students’ emotional and motivational processes in relation to different aspects of social support and the school environment. In the present study, 279 students from 20 classes of two secondary schools completed a questionnaire on their contextual situations in distance learning, the organization and amount of their learning, and the resulting emotions and motivations. Results show that students’ perceived joy during the crisis was relatively low, while perceived anxiety was relatively high. Regression analyses showed relations of general enjoyment and joy of learning in the crisis to self-efficacy belief, which was in turn influenced by environmental predictors such as support from family and school as well as the student–teacher relationship. Thus, school authorities and teachers can effectively contribute to students’ mastering of the crisis by establishing a transparent information policy, well-structured learning routines, and virtual lessons.

Attention to emotional faces was tested in a series of 5 experiments using the flanker paradigm. Distraction and compatibility effects that were stronger for emotional compared to neutral faces were found in only one of the studies. No reliable differences were found between faces displaying different emotions. The data suggest that attentional capture of emotional faces depends on emotion being a task relevant feature, indicating that attention has to be intentionally allocated to emotional information for those effects to materialize. Our findings also indicate that attending to emotions due to task requirements is not a sufficient condition for an attentional bias towards emotional faces. Even within emotion classification tasks, we only found reliable attentional prioritizing of emotional faces when the position of the target stimulus varied across trials and had to be identified on the basis of an additional feature, thus rendering the processing of the flanker stimuli obligatory in the task. In sum, these findings indicate that automatic attentional capture by emotional faces is a highly conditional phenomenon.

Classroom videos are a viable means to implement evidence-informed reasoning in teacher education in order to establish an evidence-informed teaching practice. Although learning with videos relieves pre-service teachers from acting in parallel and might reduce complexity, the material still poses higher cognitive load than written text vignettes or other traditionally used static material. In particular, the information they deliver is transient and can, therefore, easily be missed. Signaling can guide learners’ attention to central aspects of a video, thereby reducing cognitive load and enhancing learning outcomes. In the current project, pre-service teachers acquired scientific knowledge about learning strategies and their promotion in a computer-based learning environment. We explored the effect of different arrangements of signaling in classroom video-examples on conceptual knowledge and the reasoning-component of professional vision. Therefore, we conducted a set of two studies with 100 student teachers including two signal arrangements in order to investigate how signaling can help learning to reason about classroom videos. In addition, we varied if participants received information on the use of signals in advance (informed) or not (uninformed). We measured conceptual knowledge by asking participants what they knew about self-regulation strategies. Additionally, we assessed reasoning by asking participants to notice sequences in a video where teachers induced learning strategies, and to reason in what respect the observed behavior was useful to induce the strategy. Uninformed signaling did not affect the acquisition of conceptual knowledge and reasoning. Informed signaling led to significantly better conceptual knowledge than uninformed signaling. It is argued that the signal-induced extraneous load exceeded the load reduction due to the signal’s selection advantage in the uninformed conditions. In a third, exploratory study, nine participants were interviewed on the perception of different signals and indicated that spotlight and zoom-in signals foster processing of classroom videos.

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