Interventions During Student Multimodal Learning Activities: which, and why?

Emotions play a significant role in students’ learning behaviour. Positive emotions can enhance learning, whilst negative emotions can inhibit it. This paper describes a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) study which investigates the potential of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) together with an emotion detector able to classify emotions from speech to support young children in their exploration and reflection whilst working with interactive learning environments. We describe a unique ecologically valid WoZ study in a classroom. During the study the wizards provided support using a script, and followed an iterative methodology which limited their capacity to communicate, in order to simulate the real system we are developing. Our results indicate that there is an effect of emotions on the acceptance of feedback. Additionally, certain types of feedback are more effective than others for particular emotions.