Toward affect-inclusive models of cognitive dynamics: Coupling epistemological resources and emotions

TL;DR

This paper advocates for integrating emotions into detailed models of students' cognitive processes, demonstrating how affect influences epistemological stances through a case study of an engineering student.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for coupling affect with epistemological resources in fine-grained cognitive models, advancing understanding of emotion-cognition interactions in learning.

Findings

Affect, specifically annoyance, stabilizes epistemological beliefs.

Emotions are deeply integrated with cognitive dynamics.

Case study illustrates emotion's role in reasoning about circuits.

Abstract

Many prominent lines of research on student's reasoning and conceptual change within learning sciences and physics education research have not attended to the role of learners' affect or emotions in the dynamics of their conceptual reasoning. This is despite evidence from psychology and cognitive- and neuro- sciences that emotions are deeply integrated with cognition and documented associations in education research between emotions and academic performance. The few studies that have aimed to integrate emotions within models of learners' cognition, have mostly done so at a coarse grain size. In this manuscript, toward the long-term goal of incorporating emotions into fine-grained models of in-themoment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study of Judy, an undergraduate electrical engineering and physics 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.