Positioning–emotions association of young students using digital technology

Researchers in social semiotics have shown students’ emotions to be associated with their positioning, an association which contributes to students’ cognitive processes and, therefore, to their learning. Nevertheless, this association between emotions and positioning, especially with regard to very young students, has not been extensively investigated with qualitative methods. The present work considers the positioning–emotions association in the context of third-grade students using digital technology to study relationships among quadrilaterals. The entire learning process of eight students, divided into four pairs, was recorded on video; the transcripts were then analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the relationship between positioning and emotion constructs. A chi-square test was run for the transcribed data to find the correlations between constructs for positioning and emotions. We found a strong connection between outsiderness and boredom and between leadership confidence; moderate connections were found between outsiderness and powerless, help-seeking and confusion, and collaboration and interestedness. We used the discursive framework for connecting positioning with emotions to encode the data and triangulate our qualitative and quantitative findings. By these means, we were able to draw conclusions regarding the role of digital technology in determining students’ positioning and of the teacher in modifying undesirable positioning and its associated emotions.