Open-ended learning environments (OELEs) support constructivist approaches to STEM learning. This promotes student engagement and facilitates a deeper understanding of STEM topics. Despite their benefits, OELEs can present significant challenges for novice learners. Recent studies have revealed the complex relationship between students' affective…

Perseverance is critical for students' achievement and may be particularly important after COVID-19. This paper includes analyses of teacher and principal interviews and student educational technology usage data to examine students' perseverance during math problem-solving across three cohorts of students during and after COVID-19. Data were…

Supporting students in becoming effective problem solvers is a critical component of K-12 mathematics instruction. Unfortunately, little is known about the factors that are related to problem solving proficiency in middle school students. We report the results of a study that employed a hierarchical linear regression analysis to examine the…

The role of affective states in learning has recently attracted considerable attention in education research. The accurate prediction of affective states can help increase the learning gain by incorporating targeted interventions that are capable of adjusting to changes in the individual affective states of students. Until recently, most work on…

Front camera data from tablets used in educational settings offer valuable clues to student behavior, attention, and affective state. Due to the camera's angle of view, the face of the student is partially occluded and skewed. This hinders the ability of experts to adequately capture the learning process and student states. In this paper, we…

In this study, I investigated Grade 4 and 5 students' emotions while they engaged in the exploration of unsolved mathematics problems, including parts of the Graceful Tree Conjecture. Ten students from an after-school program in the Midwest participated in seven task-based interviews. The students exhibited a variety of emotions throughout the…

Solving challenging math problems often invites a child to ride an "emotional roller-coaster" and experience a complex mixture of emotions including confusion, frustration, joy, and surprise. Early exposure to this type of "hard fun" may stimulate child's interest and curiosity of mathematics and nurture life long skills such…

The aim of this qualitative research is to identify Mexican high school students' emotional experiences in mathematics classes. In order to obtain the data, focus group interviews were carried out with 22 students. The data analysis is based on the theory of the cognitive structure of emotions (Ortony, Clore & Collins, 1988) that specifies the…

The well-studied Baker et al., affect detectors on boredom, frustration, confusion and engagement concentration with ASSISTments dataset were used to predict state tests scores, college enrollment, and even whether a student majored in a STEM field. In this paper, we present three attempts to improve upon current affect detectors. The first…

In this article we examine intuitions as they emerge in groupwork activities. We provide a framework and a methodology to code various aspects of the activity, social and mathematical. Focusing mostly on students' gazes, we explore how affective moves give rise to, and determine, students' interactions and thoughts. We argue that intuition does…

A central theme of Mandler's theory of emotion is that the interruption of a cognitive activity sets the stage for emotion. Mandler's theory is particularly applicable to mathematical problem-solving experiences. Mandler's linking of emotion to perception also makes emotion during problem solving an excellent candidate to be modeled with…

A theoretical model and methodology is presented that allows the path or trajectory of an individual's emotional experience during problem solving to be depicted and empirically studied. The trajectory of one's emotional experience reveals how well the individual copes with the frustration of problem solving by indicating how quickly recovery…

Mandler's (1984) model of emotion is summarized in this paper and is operatonalized analytically and statistically using Thom's (1975) catastrophe theory. Data were collected from (n=15) mathematics majors in a pilot study to test Mandler's model and the nonlinear effects of emotions in solving mathematical problems. The data were found to fit…

This paper describes the use of radical constructivism as a basis for curriculum reform in university mathematics courses and reports on research conducted on two of the courses developed, one in geometry and one in problem solving. The theoretical underpinnings of the project are described along with the implications for course design and…

Most of the observational study of marriage has focused on relatively young and highly educated couples from professional backgrounds. Very little is known about the generality of this observational research to couples whose marital philosophies have been influenced by a different array of socioeconomic conditions and secular trends. Satisfied and…