Dynamics of affective states during complex learning

The Better You Feel the Better You Learn: Do Warm Colours and Rounded Shapes Enhance Learning Outcome in Multimedia Learning?

“…According to Pekrun [15] (p. 317), achievement emotions are defined as discrete emotions that occur in achievement situations ("activity emotions", e.g., pleasure during learning) or when a person is confronted with actual or anticipated achievement outcomes ("outcome emotions"). It is furthermore assumed that affective states (i.e., activity emotions) change dynamically while learning and directly impact learning-related cognitive and motivational processes such as self-regulation, creative problemsolving, the use of learning strategies, or intrinsic motivation [19][20][21][22][23]. In the present study, we investigate activity emotions, and therefore we will not elaborate any further about outcome emotions.…”

“…Empirical findings indicate that there is a broad variety of learning-related affective states that appear frequently and change dynamically in the learning situation [19]. There is some empirical evidence that induced affect is detrimental for learning outcome because of enhanced task-irrelevant thinking (e.g., [24]).…”

“…Second, affective states are reciprocally linked and can instantly influence or elicit each other [44]. According to D'Mello and Graesser [19], different affective states occur throughout learning situations. These affective experiences therefore might interfere with the preexperimental affect induction and compromise a successful emotion induction.…”

“…Moreover, retrospective assessment of affective states might be confounded by memory distortions. Affect further changes dynamically [19] during learning. These changes cannot be observed using questionnaires after the learning situation.…”

Bridging the gap between cognitive neuroscience and education: Psychophysiological and behavioral data collection in authentic contexts

“…Contingency, the dynamic adaptation of agents in a learning situation in the form of scaffolding, (Wood & Wood, 1999), rests on a moment-by-moment characterization of the state of a learner, or of a group of learners. In particular, the development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), hinging on online models of the learners which inform the ITS regarding its next moves in a learning interaction, inherently depends on better and more complete ways of characterizing the cognitive and affective states of the learner during a learning task, as ongoing research in this direction testifies (Azevedo, Moos, Johnson, Chauncey, 2010;Chi, VanLehn, Litman, & Jordan, 2011;D'Mello & Graesser, 2012). Recent research on tutoring has shown that the frequency of this characterization of the state of the learner is particularly important (Van Lehn, 2011).…”