Alice Hansen

Affect Matters: Exploring the Impact of Feedback During Mathematical Tasks in an Exploratory Environment

We describe a Wizard-of-Oz study that investigates the impact of different types of feedback on students’ affective states. Our results indicate the importance of matching carefully the affective state with appropriate feedback in order to help students transition into more positive states. For example when students were confused affect boosts and specific instruction seem to be effective in helping students to be in flow again. We discuss this and other effective ways to and implications for the development of our system and the field in general.

Purpose and Level of Feedback in an Exploratory Learning Environment for Fractions

This paper reports on our progress on a systematic approach to operationalizing support in Fractions Lab – an exploratory learning environment for learning fractions in primary education. In particular, we focus on the question of what feedback to provide and consider in detail the implementation of feedback according to two dimensions: the purpose of the feedback, depending on the task-specific needs of the student, and the level of feedback, depending on the cognitive needs of the student. We present early findings from our design-based research that includes Wizard-of-Oz studies of the intelligent feedback system and student perception questionnaires.

Exploring Students’ Affective States During Learning with External Representations

We conducted a user study that explored the relationship between students’ usage of multiple external representations and their affective states during fractions learning. We use the affective states of the student as a proxy indicator for the ease of reasoning with the representation. Extending existing literature that highlights the advantages of learning with multiple external representations, our results indicate that low-performing students have difficulties in reasoning with representations that do not fully accommodate the fraction as a part-whole concept. In contrast, high-performing students were at ease with a range of representations, including the ones that vaguely involved the fraction as part-whole concept.