Project

Fostering Affect Awareness and Regulation in Learning

Groups

Sometimes learners have to focus while experiencing strong emotions (e.g., family problems).�They may also face challenges in perservering when encountering repeated failures in problem solving. The ability to know what one is feeling (e.g., worried, frustrated) and rise above it and handle the situation productively involves meta-affective skills. With such skills, a learner feeling "I can't do this; I want to quit," might instead think, "I am frustrated, but this is OK�it happens to experts. I should look for a different way to solve this."�This research develops theory and technology to help learners develop meta-affective skills. Two recent achievements are development of (1) a technology with machine "common-sense" emotion�reasoning for enabling teenage girls to reflect on emotions in stories that they've constructed and improve their affect awareness; and (2) a technology to help students become stronger learners even when they feel like quitting.