Beyond the cognitive dimension: Emotion patterns in productive and improvable knowledge building discourse

Knowledge Building is a pedagogical approach emphasizing students' collective responsibility to continuously improve their community knowledge. Various emotions may arise during Knowledge Building activities because of students’ diverse ideas, theory-building and cognitive disequilibrium and equilibrium. These emotions may differ in inquiry threads at different discourse development levels. An inquiry thread is a sequence of notes addressing the same problem or topic. This study examines the frequency and sequential patterns between undergraduate students’ productive and improvable Knowledge Building inquiry threads recorded in Knowledge Forum. We found that emotions reflected in inquiry threads tend to be self-repeated. A series of positive and negative activating emotions were reflected in productive
collaborative inquiry threads, suggesting students engaged in the discussion despite conflicting ideas and various emotions. On the other hand, improvable collaborative inquiry threads displayed activating to deactivating emotion transitions, such as joy to boredom, which shows that students might disengage from the discussion.