No abstract

We study the incidence (rate of occurrence), persistence (rate of reoccurrence immediately after occurrence), and impact (effect on behavior) of students' cognitive-affective states during their use of three different computer-based learning environments. Students' cognitive-affective states are studied using different populations (Philippines, USA), different methods (quantitative field observation, self-report), and different types of learning environments (dialogue tutor, problemsolving game, and problem-solving based Intelligent Tutoring System). By varying the studies along these multiple factors, we can have greater confidence that findings which generalize across studies are robust. The incidence, persistence, and impact of boredom, frustration, confusion, engaged concentration, delight, and surprise were compared. We found that boredom was very persistent across learning environments and was associated with poorer learning and problem behaviors, such as gaming the system. Despite prior hypothesis to the contrary, frustration was less persistent, less associated with poorer learning, and did not appear to be an antecedent to gaming the system. Confusion and engaged concentration were the most common states within all three learning environments. Experiences of delight and surprise were rare. These findings suggest that significant effort should be put into detecting and responding to boredom and confusion, with a particular emphasis on developing pedagogical interventions to disrupt the "vicious cycles" which occur when a student becomes bored and remains bored for long periods of time.

No abstract

Many important learning tasks feel uninteresting and tedious to learners. This research proposed that promoting a prosocial, self-transcendent purpose could improve academic self-regulation on such tasks. This proposal was supported in four studies with over 2,000 adolescents and young adults. Study 1 documented a correlation between a self-transcendent purpose for learning and self-reported trait measures of academic self-regulation. Those with more of a purpose for learning also persisted longer on a boring task rather than giving in to a tempting alternative, and, many months later, were less likely to drop out of college. Study 2 addressed causality. It showed that a brief, one-time psychological intervention promoting a self-transcendent purpose for learning could improve high school science and math GPA over several months. Studies 3 and 4 were short-term experiments that explored possible mechanisms. They showed that the self-transcendent purpose manipulation could increase deeper learning behavior on tedious test review materials (Study 3), and sustain self-regulation over the course of an increasingly-boring task (Study 4). More self-oriented motives for learning—such as the desire to have an interesting or enjoyable career—did not, on their own, consistently produce these benefits (Studies 1 and 4).

No abstract

Mind wandering is a phenomenon in which attention drifts away from the primary task to task-unrelated thoughts. Previous studies have used self-report methods to measure the frequency of mind wandering and its effects on task performance. Many of these studies have investigated mind wandering in simple perceptual and memory tasks, such as recognition memory, sustained attention, and choice reaction time tasks. Manipulations of task difficulty have revealed that mind wandering occurs more frequently in easy than in difficult conditions, but that it has a greater negative impact on performance in the difficult conditions. The goal of this study was to examine the relation between mind wandering and task difficulty in a high-level cognitive task, namely reading comprehension of standardized texts. We hypothesized that reading comprehension may yield a different relation between mind wandering and task difficulty than has been observed previously. Participants read easy or difficult versions of eight passages and then answered comprehension questions after reading each of the passages. Mind wandering was reported using the probecaught method from several previous studies. In contrast to the previous results, but consistent with our hypothesis, mind wandering occurred more frequently when participants read difficult rather than easy texts. However, mind wandering had a more negative influence on comprehension for the difficult texts, which is consistent with the previous data. The results are interpreted from the perspectives of the executive-resources and control-failure theories of mind wandering, as well as with regard to situation models of text comprehension.

We explored the reliability of detecting a learner's affect from conversational features extracted from interactions with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that helps students learn by holding a conversation in natural language. Training data were collected in a learning session with AutoTutor, after which the affective states of the learner were rated by the learner, a peer, and two trained judges. Inter-rater reliability scores indicated that the classifications of the trained judges were more reliable than the novice judges. Seven data sets that temporally integrated the affective judgments with the dialogue features of each learner were constructed. The first four datasets corresponded to the judgments of the learner, a peer, and two trained judges, while the remaining three data sets combined judgments of two or more raters. Multiple regression analyses confirmed the hypothesis that dialogue features could significantly predict the affective states of boredom, confusion, flow, and frustration. Machine learning experiments indicated that standard classifiers were moderately successful in discriminating the affective states of boredom, confusion, flow, frustration, 123 46 S. K. D'Mello et al. and neutral, yielding a peak accuracy of 42% with neutral (chance = 20%) and 54% without neutral (chance = 25%). Individual detections of boredom, confusion, flow, and frustration, when contrasted with neutral affect, had maximum accuracies of 69, 68, 71, and 78%, respectively (chance = 50%). The classifiers that operated on the emotion judgments of the trained judges and combined models outperformed those based on judgments of the novices (i.e., the self and peer). Follow-up classification analyses that assessed the degree to which machine-generated affect labels correlated with affect judgments provided by humans revealed that human-machine agreement was on par with novice judges (self and peer) but quantitatively lower than trained judges. We discuss the prospects of extending AutoTutor into an affect-sensing ITS.

No abstract