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Examining the relationship between emotion variability, self-regulated learning, and task performance in an intelligent tutoring system

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Abstract

Prior research has focused extensively on how emotion tendencies (e.g., duration, frequency, intensity, and valence) affect students’ performance, but little is known about emotion variability (i.e., the fluctuations in emotion states) and how emotion variability affects performance. In this paper, emotion variability was examined among 21 medical students in the context of solving two patient cases of different complexity with BioWorld, a computer-based intelligent tutoring system. Specifically, we examined the influences of task complexity on emotion variability, emotion variability in self-regulated learning (SRL) phases, and the differences in emotion variability between high and low performers. We found that students’ emotion variability varies depending on the SRL phases (i.e., forethought, performance, and self-reflection) and task complexity. High performing students had smaller emotion variability than low performers across the three SRL phases, but the differences in emotion variability were not statistically significant. Moreover, emotion variability in the forethought phase contributed most to high performance when compared to the emotional variability in the performance and self-reflection phases. This study advances theoretical development about emotion variability and provides insights that help explain the mixed results that existed in extant literature.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture (FRQSC) awarded to the first and second authors, as well as in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) awarded to the third author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Shan Li, Juan Zheng & Susanne P. Lajoie

  2. Center for Medical Education, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Jeffrey Wiseman

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  1. Shan Li
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  2. Juan Zheng
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  3. Susanne P. Lajoie
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  4. Jeffrey Wiseman
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Correspondence to Shan Li.

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The research was conducted in accordance with the journal’s ethical guidelines. The authors declare that the work described was original research that has not been published previously, and not under considerations for publication elsewhere. This study was approved by the Research Ethics Board of McGill University.

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Li, S., Zheng, J., Lajoie, S.P. et al. Examining the relationship between emotion variability, self-regulated learning, and task performance in an intelligent tutoring system. Education Tech Research Dev 69, 673–692 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-09980-9

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