Tentative Research Plan

My current research interest is to identify the overlap between affective and cognitive components, as well as the influence of learners’ emotional metacognition on learning processes. In other words, I would like to investigate how learner’s emotional states and their perceptions on it would impact their learning experiences. As mentioned in my high-level conjecture map, I hypothesized that learner’s emotional state would either facilitate or impede their cognitive system. And in the “Extended Explanation” section and “Theoretical framework” section, I previously highlighted the importance of assisting learners in developing emotional self-regulation. As I believe that enhanced emotional self-awareness is the starting point of emotional self-regulation, I designed an emotion analysis tool that aims to assist students in better understanding their emotions and events that surround them.

 

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• Research questions

 

1. What effect does increased emotional metacognitive self-awareness have on self-regulation and motivation?

2. What effect does emotion trend analysis have on the learning experience?

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•  Methods

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I would like to recruit student participants who are at least 13 to 18 years old, considering that verbal ability and vocabulary richness is crucial in self-reports of emotion. (Scherer et al., 2013). Due to the difficulty of comparing subjective reports across individuals or relying on their accuracy, I will utilize forced-choice self-reports using the Geneva Emotion Wheel instrument. As an accurate understanding of the emotion word is required for data reliability, workshops or lectures on learning 20 different emotion words will be held prior to the learners' emotion data being collected. First, through surveys and subsequent one-on-one interviews, I will investigate how student’s emotional awareness has changed over time, and how this has impacted their emotional self-regulation processes. Secondly, to find out the extent to which their metacognitive emotional perception influenced their learning, task pre- and post-evaluation will be analyzed. Less constrained tasks, such as writing an essay, will be used to examine the influence of emotional awareness because they imply a greater influence of emotions on modes of thinking than highly constrained tasks.