Exploring the entanglement of personal epistemologies and emotions in students’ thinking

Abstract

Evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that cognition and emotions are coupled. Education researchers have also documented correlations between emotions (such as joy, anxiety, fear, curiosity, boredom) and academic performance. Nonetheless, most research on students' reasoning and conceptual change within the learning sciences and physics and science education research has not attended to the role of learners' emotions in describing or modeling the fine timescale dynamics of their conceptual reasoning. The few studies that integrate emotions into models of learners' cognition have mostly done so at a coarse grain size. In this study, toward the long-term goal of incorporating emotions into models of in-themoment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study of Judy, an undergraduate electrical engineering and physics major. We show that shifts in the intensity of a fine-grained aspect of Judy's emotions, her annoyance at conceptual homework problems, co-occur with shifts in her epistemological stance toward differentiating knowledge about and the practical utility of real circuits and idealized circuit models. We then argue for the plausibility of a cognitive model in which Judy's emotions and epistemological stances mutually affect each other. We end with discussions on how models of learners' cognition that incorporate their emotions are generative for instructional purposes and research on learning.

"Eureka!" "That's funny...": Problematization and value in two classroom epiphanies

“…These feelings are entangled with their cognition. Recent research names this entanglement epistemic affect and documents its importance to engagement [4] and personal epistemologies [5]. We believe a joint attention to problematization and affect is a productive lens through which to interpret this year's conference theme.…”

“…All student names are pseudonyms, and pronouns are what they used for each other. We did not collect their pronouns or other demographic information, a choice that avoids potentially taxing self-disclosure but can be inaccurate [5,16].…”

Attending to emotion in a metaphor for success in physics with poetic analysis

“…Biology education researchers have also noted that women in introductory biology were more affected by negative academic emotions that could lead them to self-deprecating cycles [30]. Studies in PER have revealed links between emotions of control (e.g., frustration, calmness) to performance [31]; emotions towards physics topics to engagement [32]; stress to retention [33]; and emotions to shifts in reasoning [34,35]. These correlations between emotions and learning highlight the value of considering emotions in PER to better understand their effect on learning.…”

“…The PER studies mentioned above attempt to capture students' emotive expressions by representing dialogue as transcripts with detailed notations of inflections and pauses as well as cartoon comics for visual aid [34][35][36]. We use poetic inquiry "to evoke emotional responses that bring the readers closer to the work, and to permit silenced voices/stories to be heard" (p. 230) [37].…”

Research on university faculty members’ reasoning about how departments change

“…To characterize faculty thinking, we adopt a situated resources perspective, which assumes individuals hold many productive ideas to reason about any given topic [5,6]. Such conceptual ideas dynamically interact with context, identities, epistemologies, and emotions [7,8]. While a situated resources perspective has been developed to study student's conceptual reasoning about physics, we find it useful to apply to faculty because it foregrounds the multiplicity of ideas they hold.…”