| Popis: |
Today's fast evolving environment makes it all the more crucial for children to be able to learn new things and adapt. Understanding how to foster learning and memory is a key part of that. With that in mind, the aim of this study is to better distinguish the type of epistemic emotions that are most effective in strengthening a child's memory retention of scientific learning content, looking specifically at curiosity and awe. We propose to investigate this through an experimental protocol in virtual reality (VR), in which young children (7-12 years old) will be exposed to scientific learning scenarios intended to provoke curiosity and awe. A range of physiological measurements will be taken, a self-report using specially designed emotional scales, as well as vocal responses, and a semi-structured interview will be carried out to investigate the emotion(s) felt and memory retention. While the COVID-19 pandemic prevented us from conducting the main experiment, cartoon scales were specially designed to be used in the semi-structured interview. They were investigated through an online questionnaire. In short, we found encouraging support for our dynamic epistemic emotion cartoon scales, where children were found to have much higher accuracy when matching cartoons to words, than cartoons to definitions, than words to definitions. Boys overall achieved a higher accuracy than girls in all trials, which would be interesting to research further. Once a larger scale study to validate these scales has been performed, we believe that they will make a great addition to child research on epistemic emotions. |
