Identifying epistemic emotions from activity analytics in interactive digital learning environments

Processing complex information during learning can trigger related epistemic emotions, such as confusion, frustration, or boredom. These emotions are likely to impact learning and it is crucial to provide learners with relevant support according to the emotions they experience. Being aware of epistemic emotions may help teachers design adaptive learning environments that help learners control their levels and durations. Within interactive digital learning environments, students are also likely to experience epistemic emotions but their detection by a teacher can be problematic because students and teachers are not co-located. However, the trace data that students produce while interacting with digital environments can be themselves useful indicators of some epistemic emotions. These data require digital learning environments offering sufficiently rich interactive features and technically capable of collecting interaction data, although these features must be primarily designed to foster high quality learning. Moreover, the uniqueness of each learning situation imposes that interpretations of observed interaction patterns to epistemic emotions do need to be determined individually for each situation.