Affect in Physics Learning: Entanglement with Cognition and Learning Goals

Abstract

Physics education research (PER) has traditionally focused on cognitive aspects of physics learning, including in the study of conceptual and epistemological dynamics of student thinking and engagement. All the while, research in a variety of fields has shown that examining cognition without attention to the emotional and motivational dynamics at play can only provide a partial understanding of learning and engagement. In this chapter, we outline how recent research in science education, including some recent work in PER, is attending to affect in accounts of learning, and we explore what such attention has afforded the field. We first describe how research on affect is retracing the path of research on cognition, shifting away from individualistic accounts grounded in stable, trait-like attributions, toward more context-dependent individualistic accounts and, most recently, toward sociocultural accounts that conceptualize affect as constituted in historical and political configurations. We then discuss how the research on affect in physics learning can be categorized along two dimensions: (1) A cognition-affect entanglement axis characterizing whether cognition and affect are modeled as separable, reflexively interacting, entangled, or even co-constitutive; and (2) A learning goals axis characterizing how radical learning goals are with respect to including affect, ranging from traditional goals (e.g., content learning and/or problem solving where attention to students' feelings is in service of these cognitive goals) to mainstream reform goals (e.g., engagement in science practices, perhaps experienced as enjoyable) to enhanced, affect-infused reform goals (e.g., viewing the experience of disciplinary affect as part of learning the discipline) to radical goals that challenge the field's views about what counts as physics and as physics learning. Taken together, the studies we review showcase how attending to affect enriches the field's understanding of learning and offer future directions for examining and integrating affect into PER. We hope this chapter provides permission—and indeed, inspires and compels—PER scholars to bring out matters of affect as central to learning and becoming in the discipline. In doing so, we hope to problematize and challenge the long-standing inattention to affect in PER, inattention that may contribute to the marginalization of underrepresented students from the world of physics and physics education.