Examining How Students' Typical Studying Emotions Relate to Those Experienced While Studying with an ITS

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We help advance the research on emotions with a preliminary investigation of differences between 116 students' typical studying emotions and those they experienced while studying with an ITS. Results revealed that students reported significantly lower levels of negative emotions while studying with an ITS compared to their typical emotional dispositions toward studying. 1 Introduction Achievement emotions are critical because of the impact they have on our success and failure in important and influential domains such as learning and success in school [1]. Emotions can support achievement by fostering motivation, focusing attention and limited cognitive resources on achievement-related activities and promoting adaptive information processing and self-regulation strategies [1]. While research has focused on the emotions learners tend to experience while interacting with these systems, little is known about how students general academic emotional tendencies compare with those experienced during these, often novel, interactions [2]. Understanding how students typically feel while studying is valuable because of its potential to inform user models and design more adaptive ITSs [3]. Moreover, comparisons provide an affective benchmark to help researchers appreciate affective benefits or shortcomings that systems have when compared to students' academic status quo. In this study, we investigated the effect of administering the achievement emotions questionnaire (AEQ [1]) prior to learners' interaction with MetaTutor and halfway through their interaction with it on the negative emotions they reported experiencing. We were particularly interested in learners' negative emotions because of the deleterious impact they can have on learners' experience with the system, self-regulated learning skill use, and achievement. Our hypothesis was that learners would report lower intensity levels of these emotions while studying with MetaTutor on account of lower appraisals of instrumental task value [4, 5]. In other words, because MetaTutor is a low stakes studying environment, like many ITSs, students can focus on content and process practice and mastery without concern for grades [3].