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Abstract Emoji are commonly used in social media to convey affects, emotions, and attitudes. While popular in social media, their use in educational contexts has been sparsely studied even though emoji can be a natural way for students to express what they are feeling about the learning material. This paper studies how students use instructor-selected emoji when relating to and engaging with educational content. We use an online platform for collaborative annotations where discussions are embedded into the readings for the course. We also make it possible for students to use 11 unique emoji-hashtag pairings to express their thoughts and feelings about the readings and the ongoing discussion. We provide an empirical analysis of the usage of these emoji-hashtag pairs by over 1,800 students enrolled in different offerings of an introductory biology course from multiple academic terms. We also introduce a heat map, which allows the instructional team to visualize the distribution and types of emoji used by students in different parts of the reading material. To evaluate the heat map, we conducted a user study with five instructors/TAs. We found that instructors/TAs use the heat map as a tool for identifying textbook sections that students find difficult and/or interesting and plan to use it to help them design the online content for future classes. Finally, we introduce a computational analysis for predicting emoji/hashtag pairs based on the content of a given student post. We use pre-trained deep learning language models (BERT) to predict the emoji attached to a student’s post and then study the extent to which this model generated in an introductory biology course can be generalized to predict student emoji usage in other courses.
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#lets-discuss: Analyzing student affect in course forums using emoji.
Emoji are commonly used in social media to convey attitudes and emotions. While popular, their use in educational contexts has been sparsely studied. This paper reports on the students’ use of emoji in an online course forum in which students annotate and discuss course material in the margins of the online textbook. For this study, instructors created 11 custom emoji-hashtag pairs that enabled students to quickly communicate affects and reactions in the forum that they experienced while interacting with the course material. Example reporting includes, inviting discussion about a topic, declaring a topic as interesting, or requesting assistance about a topic. We analyze emoji usage by over 1,800 students enrolled in multiple offerings of the same course across multiple academic terms. The data show that some emoji frequently appear together in posts associated with the same paragraphs, suggesting that students use the emoji in this way to communicating complex affective states. We explore the use of computational models for predicting emoji at the post level, even when posts are lacking emoji. This capability can allow instructors to infer information about students’ affective states during their ”at home” interactions with course readings. Finally, we show that partitioning the emoji into distinct groups, rather than trying to predict individual emoji, can be both of pedagogical value to instructors and improve the predictive performance of our approach using the BERT language model. Our procedure can be generalized to other courses and for the benefit of other instructors.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1915724
- PAR ID:
- 10374291
- Editor(s):
- Mitrovic, A.; Bosch, N.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Educational Data Mining
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 339–345
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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