Exploring students’ affective states during learning with external representations

We conducted a user study that explored the relationship between students’ usage of multiple external representations and their affective states during fractions learning. We use the affective states of the student as a proxy indicator for the ease of reasoning with the representation. Extending existing literature that highlights the advantages of learning with multiple external representations, our results indicate that low-performing students have difficulties in reasoning with representations that do not fully accommodate the fraction as a part-whole concept. In contrast, high-performing students were at ease with a range of representations, including the ones that vaguely involved the fraction as part-whole concept