Development of a Survey Instrument for Measuring Affective Pathways

This research paper examines a pilot survey question to measure students' affective pathways when solving open-ended, ill-defined modeling problems. Research on affect in mathematics has discovered that students' emotions tend to fall into familiar patterns, or affective pathways, that students have developed over time. These pathways are in part influenced by their global affect, or student attitudes and values about a subject. It is inevitable that frustration will occur at some point when solving a challenging problem; however, from the point of frustration, some students experience positive pathways in which they move from those challenges into eventual satisfaction, while other students' affect falls into negative pathways that move from anxiety into fear or despair and rote procedures or avoidance of the problem. Just as students' global attitudes influences the emotions experienced throughout the problem, the traces of the affective pathways over time can in turn influence global affect - following a negative pathway repeatedly can, over time, build global hatred of themselves or the subject. These affective pathways have typically been assessed primarily through qualitative methods. In this study, we sought to measure students' affective pathways while undertaking ill-defined problems in engineering science courses. We included a pilot question in a survey given to students at three universities in four different courses solving open-ended modeling problems in one semester, asking them to drag and drop positive and negative affective words derived from our prior work into the pathway they took when solving the problem. Our goal in piloting this survey question is to have an effective way to measure students' affective pathways at scale in situations across their engineering education, in order to understand the implications on their global affect about engineering. We believe that the development of an effective tool for measuring affective pathways will facilitate future studies on retention in engineering.