Commercial facial affect detection software is typically trained on large databases and achieves high accuracy in detecting basic emotions, but their use in educational settings is unclear. The goal of this research is to determine how basic emotions relate to the achievement emotion states that are more relevant in academic settings. Such relations, if accurate and consistent, may be leveraged tomake more effective use of the commercial affect-detection software. For this study, we collected affect data over four days from a classroom study with 65 students using Betty's Brain. Basic emotions obtained from commercial software were aligned to achievement emotions obtained using sensor-free models. Interpretable classifiers enabled the study of relationships between the two types of emotions. Our findings show that certain basic emotions can help infer complex achievement emotions such as confusion, frustration and engaged concentration. This suggests the possibility of using commercial software as a less context-sensitive and more development-friendly alternative to the affect detector models currently used in learning environments.

Confusion has been shown to be prevalent during complex learning and has mixed effects on learning. Whether confusion facilitates or hampers learning may depend on whether it is resolved or not. Confusion resolution, behind which is the resolution of cognitive disequilibrium, requires learners to possess some skills, but it is unclear what these skills are. One possibility may be metacognitive strategies (MS), strategies for regulating cognition. This study examined the relationship between confusion and actions related to MS in Betty's Brain, a computer-based learning environment. The results revealed that MS behavior differed during and outside confusion. However, confusion resolution was not related to MS behavior, and MS did not moderate the effect of confusion on learning.

The past few years have seen a surge of interest in deep neural networks. The wide application of deep learning in other domains such as image classification has driven considerable recent interest and efforts in applying these methods in educational domains. However, there is still limited research comparing the predictive power of the deep learning approach with the traditional feature engineering approach for common student modeling problems such as sensor-free affect detection. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting a thorough comparison of several deep neural network approaches with a traditional feature engineering approach in the context of affect and behavior modeling. We built detectors of student affective states and behaviors as middle school students learned science in an open-ended learning environment called Betty's Brain, using both approaches. Overall, we observed a tradeoff where the feature engineering models were better when considering a single optimized threshold (for intervention), whereas the deep learning models were better when taking model confidence fully into account (for discovery with models analyses).

The relationship between learners' cognitive and affective states has become a topic of increased interest, especially because it is an important component of self-regulated learning (SRL) processes. This paper studies sixth grade students' SRL processes as they work in Betty's Brain, an agent-based open-ended learning environment (OELE). In this environment, students learn science topics by building causal models. Our analyses combine observational data on student affect with log files of students' interactions within the OELE. Preliminary analyses show that two relatively infrequent affective states, boredom and delight, show especially marked differences among high and low performing students. Further analysis shows that many of these differences occur after receiving feedback from the virtual agents in the Betty's Brain environment. We discuss the implications of these differences and how they can be used to construct adaptive personalized scaffolds.