Understanding students' difficulties in terms of coupled epistemological and affective dynamics

TL;DR

This paper explores how students' affective states, like annoyance, influence their epistemological stances in engineering learning, highlighting the dynamic interplay between emotion and knowledge beliefs.

Contribution

It integrates two research lines by analyzing how affect stabilizes specific epistemological stances in real-time learning contexts.

Findings

Affect, such as annoyance, can stabilize epistemological beliefs.

Students shift between multiple epistemological stances depending on context.

Affective states influence students' perceptions of disciplinary gaps.

Abstract

An established body of literature shows that a student's affect can be linked to her epistemological stance [1]. In this literature, the epistemology is generally taken as a belief or stance toward a discipline, and the affective stance applies broadly to a discipline or classroom culture. A second, emerging line of research, however, shows that a student in a given discipline can shift between multiple locally coherent epistemological stances [2]. To begin uniting these two bodies of literature, toward the long-term goal of incorporating affect into fine-grained models of in-the-moment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study of "Judy", an undergraduate engineering major. We argue that a fine-grained aspect of Judy's affect, her annoyance at a particular kind of homework problem, stabilizes a context-dependent epistemological stance she displays, about an unbridgeable gulf she perceives to exist between real and ideal circuits.