The intricate dance between cognition and emotion during expert tutoring

Abstract

Although, many have theorized about the link between cognition and affect and its potential importance in complex tasks such as problem solving and deep learning, this link has seldom been explicitly investigated during tutoring. Consequently, this paper investigates the relationship between learners' cognitive and affective states during 50 tutoring sessions with expert human tutors. Association rule mining analyses revealed significant co-occurrence relationships between several of the cognitive measures (i.e., student answer types, question types, misconceptions, and metacomments) and the affective states of confusion, frustration, and anxiety, but not happiness. We also derived a number of association rules (Cognitive State → Affective State) from the co-occurrence relationships. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories that link affect and cognition during learning and for the development of affect-sensitive ITSs. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.