What Are You Feeling? Investigating Student Affective States During Expert Human Tutoring Sessions

One-to-one tutoring is an extremely effective method for producing learning gains in students and for contributing to greater understanding and positive attitudes towards learning. However, learning inevitably involves failure and a host of positive and negative affective states. In an attempt to explore the link between emotions and learning this research has collected data on student affective states and engagement levels during high stakes learning in one-to-one expert tutoring sessions. Our results indicate that only the affective states of confusion, happiness, anxious, and frustration occurred at significant levels. We also investigated the extent to which expert tutors adapt their pedagogical and motivational strategies in response to learners’ affective and cognitive states.