Considering Alternate Futures to Classify Off-Task Behavior as Emotion Self-Regulation: A Supervised Learning Approach

Over the past decade, there has been growing interest in real-time assessment of student engagement and motivation during interactions with educational software. Detecting symptoms of disengagement, such as offtask behavior, has shown considerable promise for understanding students’ motivational characteristics during learning. In this paper, we investigate the affective role of off-task behavior by analyzing data from student interactions with CRYSTAL ISLAND, a narrative-centered learning environment for middle school microbiology. We observe that off-task behavior is associated with reduced student learning, but preliminary analyses of students’ affective transitions suggest that off-task behavior may also serve a productive role for some students coping with negative affective states such as frustration. Empirical findings imply that some students may use off-task behavior as a strategy for self-regulating negative emotional states during learning.