This is just a short sketch. The idea is like follows: A student is working within a learning environment such as ActiveMath. Beside an opened book/course the student has also activated the learning diary which is displayed somehow. While the student is writing an entry in his diary, the diary itself asks ActiveMath in the background for the current context. The context information comprises the book’s id and all items of the current page. One could simply assume that while the student is writing the entry he is reflecting on the learning items of the current page.

Today, I read a very interesting AIED 2007 article about emotions during learning. The article title is Getting under the Skin of Learners: Tools for Evaluating Emotional Experience and it is written by Madeline Alsm,eyer, Rose Luckin, and Judith Good.

Some very surprising evaluation results are:

• There is a discrepancy between students recalling an emotion and the emotion estimation by a neutral observer. It suggests that whatever signals the observer receives and interprets, he still might be wrong.
• A typical expectation that students become more confident, feel more pride and less anxiety after a positive interaction with a teacher, is not confirmed.
• One of the positive findings is that certain emotions are not likely to change (boredom, hopelessness) while others change rapidly (relief, anxiety)

I shoudl follow up with that study.