How does Students’ Affect in Virtual Learning Relate to Their Outcomes? A Systematic Review Challenging the Positive-Negative Dichotomy

Several emotional theories that inform the design of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) categorize affect as either positive or negative. However, the relationship between affect and learning appears to be more complex than that. Despite several empirical investigations in the last fifteen years, including a few that have attempted to complexify the role of affect in students’ learning in VLE, there has not been an attempt to synthesize the evidence across them. To bridge this gap, we conducted a systematic review of empirical studies that examined the relationship between student outcomes and the affect that arises during their interaction with a VLE. Our synthesis of results across thirty-nine papers suggests that except engagement, all of the commonly studied affective states (confusion, frustration, and boredom) have mixed relationships with outcomes. We further explored the differences in student demographics and study context to explain the variation in the results. Some of our key findings include poorer learning outcomes arising for confusion in classrooms (versus lab studies), differences in brief versus prolonged confusion and resolved versus persistent confusion, more positive (versus null) results for engagement in learning games, and more significant results for rarer affective states like frustration with automated affect detectors (versus student self-reports). We conclude that more careful attention must be paid to contextual differences in affect's role in student learning. We discuss the implication of this review for VLE design and research.