Exploring Students’ Epistemic Emotions in Knowledge Building Using Multimodal Data

Abstract

Grasping students' emotions, especially those relating to learning, in a collaborative setting is no easy feat for teachers. The quality of collaboration comprises both visible behavior and emotion and the less visible emotional traits relating to engagement and motivation. Teachers often rely on their experience and intuition when it comes to these invisible traits. In this study, we collected multimodal data from a collaborative knowledge building classroom to analyze when and how students' emotions transpire during the working and improvement of ideas. Data included textual data, self-reports from surveys, interviews, and physiological data from face-to-face and online knowledge building discourse of 17 students in a 2.5-hour Social Studies lesson. We found shifts in epistemic emotions during idea improvement activities, and the students explained these shifts in understanding the discussion and engaging in idea-centric processes. We discuss findings for ongoing work to develop multimodal analytics for knowledge building practice.