The interaction effects of emotional feedback and cognitive feedback on elementary students’ learning performance, cognitive load, and inquiry behaviours in an online scientific inquiry learning environment

Few studies have explored the combined effect of emotional and cognitive feedback, which are essential components of effective instruction, on students' learning performance in an online scientific inquiry learning environment. This study employed a 2 × 2 factorial design to investigate how emotional feedback (neutral vs. positive) and cognitive feedback (directive vs. reflective) influence students' performance, cognitive load, and inquiry behaviours in an online scientific inquiry environment. A total of 211 sixth-grade students (98 males, 113 females) were recruited from a public elementary school in China and divided into four groups. The results revealed that directive feedback improved performance on original tasks, whereas reflective feedback enhanced performance on transfer tasks. Compared with directive feedback, reflective feedback imposed less of a cognitive load on students in all dimensions. Positive emotional feedback helped reduce the mental effort associated with cognitive load. With respect to behavioural patterns, reflective feedback increased students' engagement in the targeted reverse transition rate, thus indicating deeper cognitive processing. In addition, positive emotional feedback was associated with significantly greater engagement in idea evaluation. In conclusion, reflective feedback may foster higher-order thinking and support knowledge transfer, and emotional support can reduce cognitive load during complex tasks.