Students' Performance and Emotion Entropy in the Context of Clinical Reasoning

• In Event: 64.044 - Measuring Learner Differences and Variability

Abstract

Prior research has focused extensively on how emotion tendencies (e.g. duration, frequency, intensity and valence) affect students’ performance but little is known about emotion entropy (i.e. the fluctuations in emotion states) and how emotion entropy affects performance. In this paper, emotion entropy, also referred to as variance of emotions, was examined in 21 medical students in the context of solving two patient cases of different complexity with BioWorld, a computer-based learning environment. This study revealed that task difficulty affected the variance of emotions experienced during the clinical reasoning process and also affected specific phases of self-regulated learning (SRL). We describe three patterns pertaining to students’ emotion entropy as it pertains to clinical reasoning performance.

Authors

• Shan Li, McGill University

• Juan Zheng, McGill University

• Susanne P. Lajoie, McGill University

• Jeffrey Wiseman, McGill University