Effects of students’ emotions on cognitive load and performance while using pen-tablets for learning Japanese writing: An investigation based on individual pen pressure parameters

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Whereas most research in the field of foreign-language learning has concentrated on cognitive aspects, little is known about students’ emotions, about how these would morph over the course of learning, as well as about the relationship between emotions and cognition. Moreover, the majority of research on students’ emotions when using educational technologies in diverse learning contexts still relies on self-reported questionnaires. Thus, the proposed project focuses on the effect of discrete learning-centred emotions, namely enjoyment and frustration, on cognitive load and on learning performance during the process of learning Japanese letter writing with a pen tablet-based educational technology.In order to fulfil this aim, an experiment will be conducted in which emotions will be induced through varying degrees of task difficulty. The progress of emotions as well as students’ cognitive load will be measured on several time points during learning. Further, as the use of pen-tablets offer the possibility to track and to analyse dynamic writing parameters such as the order of single strokes and the writing velocity of Japanese letters, students’ learning performance in terms of their writing accuracy will be assessed over the course of learning. Besides the measurement of performance, the incorporation of a haptic sensory modality in the form of a pen tablet is also seen to have a lot of potential for continuous emotional detection. Thus, a specific characteristic of the proposed research project is to examine whether continuously measured pen pressure parameters can serve as indicators of students’ emotions. The findings of the project will shed light on the potential of pen pressure parameters as a more fine-grained evaluation metric of emotions and will improve the understanding of the relation between students’ emotional states and cognitive aspects for learning.