The role of passion in education

Abstract

This dissertation arises from the desire to answer these questions: Is passion important in the educational context? What are the benefits of passion? Can high school students feel passion for a specific subject and can it affect their performance? It is possible to foster students’ passion? What are the specific teachers’ characteristics or behaviors that foster students’ passion? In order to shed light about the role of passion in the educational context, the main section of this dissertation presents three studies in which we analyze, first and by a systematic review, what the different authors understand by passion, and what are the consequences and promoters in education studied so far. Once inferred the importance of passion in the educational context and based on the results of the systematic review, we studied the relationship between passion and other consequences and promoters not analyzed yet. Thus, in the second study we analyze the relationship between a specific teachers’ characteristic (teacher emphasis on the usefulness of class content) and students’ harmonious passion, their intrinsic motivation to learn, and their performance in math. Finally, the third study also analyze three specific teachers’ characteristics (providing optimal challenge, focusing on the process and not only on the result, and offering positive feedback), and how they relate with students’ harmonious passion and this, in turn, with their deep strategy to learn and epistemic curiosity.