These factors can take place externally and have a significant effect on a child’s life chances. The learning process depends on a series of factors: cognitive factors (language apttitude, learning strategies), affective factors (attitudes, motivation, anxiety), metacognitive factors, and demographic factors.

Classrooms are emotional settings.

Scores on tests of cognitive abilities, including IQ scores, account for only 45-50% of the variance in academic performance. Factors that can affect learning and development are deveined into social environmental, economic and physical factors.
Emotion and Reason. Acquisition of a foreign language represents an intensively studied issue, its psychological foundation being based on the individual differences of various learners. Students’ emotional experiences can impact on their ability to learn, their engagement in school, and their career choices.

Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior.

Yet too often education research ignores or neutralizes emotions. Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Studies show that our emotional system is a complex, widely distributed, and error-prone system that defines our basic personality early in life, and is quite resistant to change. So half or more of the individual variation in academic skills is accounted for by other factors. Following is a basic introduction to the role our emotional system plays in learning, and the potential classroom applications of this research.


Early years workers should have an understanding of the factors affecting learning and development of the children in their care.