Abstract
Researchers in social semiotics have shown students’ emotions to be associated with their positioning, an association which contributes to students’ cognitive processes and, therefore, to their learning. Nevertheless, this association between emotions and positioning, especially with regard to very young students, has not been extensively investigated with qualitative methods. The present work considers the positioning–emotions association in the context of third-grade students using digital technology to study relationships among quadrilaterals. The entire learning process of eight students, divided into four pairs, was recorded on video; the transcripts were then analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the relationship between positioning and emotion constructs. A chi-square test was run for the transcribed data to find the correlations between constructs for positioning and emotions. We found a strong connection between outsiderness and boredom and between leadership confidence; moderate connections were found between outsiderness and powerless, help-seeking and confusion, and collaboration and interestedness. We used the discursive framework for connecting positioning with emotions to encode the data and triangulate our qualitative and quantitative findings. By these means, we were able to draw conclusions regarding the role of digital technology in determining students’ positioning and of the teacher in modifying undesirable positioning and its associated emotions.
Highlights
Emotions can have a profound impact on how students learn mathematics
We conducted qualitative and quantitative analysis of the relationships between positioning constructs and emotion constructs amongst pairs of elementary school students while learning geometry using digital tools
Some of the results are not unexpected, the method of confirming the relationships using a mixed method gives a robust basis for the relationship between positioning and emotions
Summary
Emotions can have a profound impact on how students learn mathematics. As Goldin [1] has emphasized, learning mathematics is not a purely cognitive process, and understanding the influence of the affective domains is a critical part of understanding students’ learning of mathematics. Students’ emotions in the mathematics classroom have attracted researchers’ attention due to their relationship with other aspects of students’ learning of mathematics, especially the cognitive aspect (e.g., [3,4]), the psychological aspect (e.g., [5], the social aspect (e.g., [6,7]) and the affective aspect (e.g., [8]). This interest in emotions has extended to students’ learning with technology (e.g., [9,10,11]). Enriching our understanding of emotions can help us understand how they influence and are influenced by other educational variables, which could enable us to make better decisions regarding the promotion of students’ success in mathematics
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