Feeling Confused Versus Feeling Uncertain: Do Tasks Help Differentiate These Two Academic Experiences?

• In Event: Putting Tasks Under the Microscope: Task Features Triggering Emotions and Modulating Their Effects on Learning

Abstract

Objective

Our purpose was to explore whether considerations of task features would help distinguish between two affective/cognitive experiences associated with learning: confusion and uncertainty. Through a re-examination of existing data and a review of prior studies, we sought to identify task characteristics that may help predict when a person feels confused as opposed to uncertain.

Theoretical Framework

When involved in different academic tasks, students often experience uncertainty and confusion (Doyle & Carter, 1984; Lehman et al., 2008). Sometimes the confusion or uncertainty is about what they are being asked to do, and sometimes it is about concepts and ideas (D’Mello & Graesser, 2012; Jordan, 2015; Jordan & Babrow, 2013). Having conducted research on both experiences, we thought it interesting to consider whether aspects of tasks would be useful in explaining these two experiences and whether comparisons of feeling confused and feeling uncertain would help us understand students’ responses to academic tasks.

Data Gathering Methods

We have two data sources. One source focused on the experience of uncertainty and included observational, discourse, and interview data from a fifth-grade class (N=24). Students engaged in three collaborative tasks in robotics across the school year: two were closed-ended and well structured (e.g., build and program), the third was open-ended and less structured (i.e., design a robot to address an environmental problem). The other study focused on the experience of confusion, with data coming from focus groups (N=27), individual interviews (N=19), and survey (N=562) responses from undergraduate students.

Findings

In the study with fifth-graders, uncertainty was a ubiquitous experience, but was less frequent and associated with fewer sources in the two more-structured tasks than in the less-structured task. Students used fewer different strategies for reducing uncertainty, and they did not use strategies for maintaining or increasing uncertainty in the more-structured than in the less-structured tasks, something we saw in the more successful groups. Social uncertainty appeared in the less-structured task, persisting over an extended time and with more negative affect than in the more-structured task.

In the study with undergraduates, students reported on their experience of confusion, demarcating class/task features that prompted confusion and what they did to resolve their confusion. Most responses (70%) fell into two categories: learning new material (professor/TA explaining new content: 29%; reading/watching material outside of class: 11%), and applying knowledge (out-of-class assignment: 20%; in-class activities: 10%). Confusion seemed associated with students detecting the need for precision in understanding of either concepts or task requirements, whereas uncertainty seemed related to the open-ended character of tasks.

Significance

An important difference between confusion and uncertainty seems related to their time course. Uncertainty appears productive for learning when students are left to deal with it, taught to accept it, and avoid foreclosure, whereas confusion seems unproductive if students are unable to resolve their confusion, especially if left to fester without supports. Differentiating between feeling confused and uncertain seems valuable for practitioners to facilitate productive learning experiences for students and to advance researchers’ theoretical understandings.

Authors

• Allison Zengilowski, Lehigh University
  Presenting Author

• Michelle Jordan, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Diane L. Schallert, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author