Attitude, Flow and Performance in an Universitary E-learning Environment

Engeser et al. (2005) have previously described that flow acts as a mediator variable between the attitude to a course in statistics and the performance in the final exam. Here we replicate this finding for an undergraduate course in perception. A total of 73 students from two cohorts completed an online training on perception. The first cohort received online exercises only on the first half, the second cohort only on the second half of the material. Attitude towards perception and computers and flow during the online exercises were measured by a questionnaire. Performance was measured in the final exam, whereas we differentiated between performance on trained and untrained items. A path analysis revealed that flow mediates between attitude towards perception and the performance on the trained items only. Thus, flow producing e-learning environments enhance performance on the trained material if students have a positive attitude towards the topic.