Poster #43 - The Differential Contributions of Achievement-Emotions to Arithmetic Outcomes in Kindergarten

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

McLeod’s (1992) seminal paper on affect laments “emotional reactions” to mathematics have not received much attention. Studies of young children’s achievement-emotions focus on the detrimental effects of mathematics anxiety (Beilock & Maloney, 2015), which is only one of many emotions children experience when engaging in mathematics. Here, we examine how universal discrete achievement-emotions – including joy, surprise, anger, disgust, and fear (Ekman, 1992) – relate to mathematics outcomes in kindergarteners.

RQ 1: What is the nature, form, and function of achievement-emotions that emerge as children solve arithmetic story problems?

RQ 2: Which achievement-emotions are associated with arithmetic accuracy, and problem-solving strategy breadth and sophistication?

Methods
Forty kindergarten students (19 girls) participated in a mathematics teaching experiment in an urban school district (Spring, 2019). Each child participated in at least 11 sessions where they worked individually with an instructor to solve arithmetic story problems. Sessions were video-recorded and used to analyze children’s emotions, and to code arithmetic outcomes.

Key Constructs & Instruments
The database contains 492 instructional sessions, where 4865 story problems were coded for accuracy, strategy breadth, and strategy sophistication (Authors, 2022).
Achievement-Related Emotions were analyzed via Noldus FaceReader 9 (Loijens & Krips, 2022). FaceReader encodes facial muscle movement into intensity scores for six discrete, universal emotions: joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear, plus a neutral state. Validation exercises showed 80% overall accuracy (Skiendziel et al., 2019), ranging from 100% for joy and 87.5% for surprise to 51% for fear.
Accuracy is binary, where 1 = Correct and 0 = Incorrect, per problem-solving attempt.
Strategy Breadth is the number of unique strategies observed during an instructional session (Siegler, 1996).
Strategy Sophistication is a 9-level ordinal metric that ranks problem-solving strategies (Authors, 2021) based on the Learning Trajectories (Clements & Sarama, 2021).

Analytic Approach
We will use the refund (Goldsmith et al., 2021) R package for analysis, also used to generate initial results.
RQ1: Functional Principal Component Analysis will identify salient patterns of achievement-emotions, as well as provide numeric and graphic descriptions across 492 instructional sessions for 40 students.
RQ2: Functional regression models with functional emotion covariates and scalar mathematics outcome responses will quantify how profiles of achievement-emotions correlate with session level outcomes.

Initial Results
Our case study of a 5-year-old girl (11 sessions) reveals differential contributions of achievement-emotions. When her expression was not neutral, surprise and joy were the most prevalent emotions. Adjusted for session, surprise at the beginning and end of a session correlates with greater accuracy (Figure 1; top left). Surprise at the end of a session correlates with greater strategy breadth (Figure 1; bottom left), but not sophistication. Contrastingly, joy at the end of a session correlates with more sophisticated strategies, but not accuracy or breadth (Figure 2; middle left).

Significance
Investigating achievement-emotions can explain variability in outcomes and serve as the target of teaching practices and interventions that strengthen early mathematics. Students must manage their emotions throughout the learning process and educators are positioned to simultaneously provide emotional and instructional support (Hamre & Pianta, 2005).

Authors

• Traci Shizu Kutaka, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Pavel Chernyavskiy, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Tara Hofkens, University of Virginia - Charlottesville