TY - GEN
T1 - Exploring the link between task complexity and students' affective states during engineering laboratory activities
AU - Hu, Qianyu
AU - Bezawada, Shruthi
AU - Gray, Allison
AU - Tucker, Conrad
AU - Brick, Timothy
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is funded in part of by the National Science Foundation. NSF NRI # 1527148: Real Time Observation, Inference and Intervention of Co-Robot Systems towards Individually Customized Performance Feedback Based on Students' Affective States, and by National Science Foundation (BCS-1030806) and the National Institute on Aging (1R21-AG041035). Any opinions, findings, or conclusions found in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2016 by ASME.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Assessment and feedback play an instrumental role in an individual's learning process. Continued assistance is required to help students learn better and faster. This need is especially prominent in engineering laboratories where students must perform a wide range of tasks using different machines. One approach to understanding how students feel towards using certain machines is to assess their affective states while they use these machines. Affective state can be defined as the state of feeling an emotion. The authors of this work hypothesize that there is a correlation between students' perceived affective states and task complexity. By adopting the Wood's complexity model, the authors propose to assess how the correlations of perceived affective states of students change while they perform tasks of different complexity. In this study, each student performs a "hard" and an "easy" task on the same machine. Each student is given the same tasks using the same materials. Knowledge gained from testing this hypothesis will provide a fundamental understanding of the tasks that negatively impact students' affective states and risk them potentially dropping out of STEM tracks, and the tasks that positively impact students' affective states and encourage them to engage in more STEM-related activities. A case study involving 22 students using a power saw machine is conducted. Perceived affective states and completion time were collected. It was found that task complexity has an effect on subjects' affective states. In addition, we observed some weak correlation between some of the perceived affective states and laboratory task performance. The distribution of correlation between affective states may change as the tasks change. With the knowledge of the relationship between task complexity and affective states, there is the potential to predict students' affective states before starting a given engineering task.
AB - Assessment and feedback play an instrumental role in an individual's learning process. Continued assistance is required to help students learn better and faster. This need is especially prominent in engineering laboratories where students must perform a wide range of tasks using different machines. One approach to understanding how students feel towards using certain machines is to assess their affective states while they use these machines. Affective state can be defined as the state of feeling an emotion. The authors of this work hypothesize that there is a correlation between students' perceived affective states and task complexity. By adopting the Wood's complexity model, the authors propose to assess how the correlations of perceived affective states of students change while they perform tasks of different complexity. In this study, each student performs a "hard" and an "easy" task on the same machine. Each student is given the same tasks using the same materials. Knowledge gained from testing this hypothesis will provide a fundamental understanding of the tasks that negatively impact students' affective states and risk them potentially dropping out of STEM tracks, and the tasks that positively impact students' affective states and encourage them to engage in more STEM-related activities. A case study involving 22 students using a power saw machine is conducted. Perceived affective states and completion time were collected. It was found that task complexity has an effect on subjects' affective states. In addition, we observed some weak correlation between some of the perceived affective states and laboratory task performance. The distribution of correlation between affective states may change as the tasks change. With the knowledge of the relationship between task complexity and affective states, there is the potential to predict students' affective states before starting a given engineering task.
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U2 - 10.1115/DETC2016-59757
DO - 10.1115/DETC2016-59757
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85007401355
T3 - Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference
BT - 18th International Conference on Advanced Vehicle Technologies; 13th International Conference on Design Education; 9th Frontiers in Biomedical Devices
PB - American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
T2 - ASME 2016 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC/CIE 2016
Y2 - 21 August 2016 through 24 August 2016
ER -