“It’s Scary but It’s Also Exciting”: Evidence of Meta-Affective Learning in Science

Abstract

We study the case of Marya, a freshman engineering major who showed and spoke of a drastic shift in her feelings and approach to learning physics during an introductory course. For the first several weeks, she was anxiously manipulating equations without considering physical meaning, and she was terribly worried about being correct. By the end of the semester, however, she was sense-making and taking pleasure in it, showing and expressing an enjoyment of challenges and uncertainty. In this paper, we illustrate Marya’s transformation using data from her interview and coursework, and we propose it as an example of meta-affective learning. We argue that meta-affective learning was an important part of Marya’s physics learning and that it was deeply entangled with her developing epistemology.

Keywords:

• Meta-affect
• affect
• epistemology
• uncertainty
• sense-making
• physics
• education

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we would like to thank “Marya,” who has inspired us and many others with her resilience and insight. We would also like to thank Bárbara Brizuela, Jessica Watkins, Julia Gouvea, Eve Manz, and Anna Phillips who provided feedback on early versions of this paper.

Notes

1 “Marya” is a pseudonym.

2 Funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Grant #3475: The Dynamics of Learners’ Persistence and Engagement in Science.

3 There were other dynamics involved as well, including her identity and goals. We focus on meta-affect and epistemology, however, because they are prominent in the evidence.

4 Now called “Flip It Physics”

5 Source: Video data of the first discussion section, on 1/21/14

6 The duration of the first interview was 1 hour and 2 minutes, and the duration of the second interview was 1 hour and 7 minutes.

7 That is, the two raters agreed in 94% of their coding decisions broken out by category, with the possibilities of no-codes and codes in each of five categories. As we explain below, however, our argument in this article depends only on the sum of codes across the five categories, not on the breakdown of codes in any one category.

8 That reasoning would be correct, for objects moving at the same speed along that distance, but in this case the shell launched at Ship 2 would be moving faster. The correct answer is that the two ships are hit at the same time: The shells have the same vertical component of velocity, because they reach the same height. Shell 2 has a greater horizontal component of velocity, so it travels a greater horizontal distance.

9 All interview excerpts from this section come from Marya’s first interview.

10 The moment of inertia for this object is $=\frac{1}{2}{M}_1{R}_1^2+\frac{1}{2}{M}_2{R}_2^2$ , where $M_1$ and $M_2$ are the first and second mass, and $R_1$ and $R_2$ are the distances of those masses from the axis of rotation. Since $R$ is squared, and $M$ is not, changing the distance from the axis of rotation has more impact on the moment of inertia than changing the mass does.

11 The units roughly correspond to the lecture number. There were two lectures per week, and roughly one unit per lecture.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Grant #3475, The Dynamics of Learners’ Persistence and Engagement in Science. The views expressed here are those of the authors alone.