Ayush Gupta is an Assistant Research Professor in Physics and Keystone Instructor in Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. His talk was titled "Integrating Emotions in Models of Students' Reasoning."

Abstract

Evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that cognition and emotion are coupled. Education researchers have also documented correlations between emotions and academic performance. Nonetheless, the role of learners' emotions in their reasoning and conceptual change has largely been unexplored. The few studies that integrate emotions into models of learners' cognition have mostly done so at a coarse grain size. Toward the long-term goal of incorporating emotions into models of in-the-moment cognitive dynamics, I present a case study of Judges, an undergraduate electrical engineering and physics major. I show that shifts in the intensity of Judy's annoyance at conceptual homework problems co-occur with shifts in her epistemological stances toward differentiating knowledge about and the practical utility of real circuits an idealized circuit models. I then argue that a cognitive model in which Judy's emotions and epistemological stances mutually affect each other is at least as plausible as a model in which conceptual and epistemological dynamics alone account for the observed stabilities and shifts, and emotions are merely "along for the ride." I'll discuss implications of attending to learners' emotions for instructional moves, as well as for curriculum development and education research.