Understanding students´ difficulties in terms of coupled epistemological and affective dynamics

Researchers have argued for students´ epistemology as connected to their affect, but at a coarse grain-size-treating epistemology as a belief or stance toward a discipline, and an emotional stance as applied broadly to a discipline or classroom culture. A second, emerging line of research, however, shows that a student can shift between multiple locally-coherent epistemological stances. To begin uniting these two bodies of literature, toward the long-term goal of incorporating emotions into fine-grained models of in-the-moment cognitive dynamics, we present a case study of Judy, an undergraduate engineering major. We argue that a fine-grained aspect of Judy´s affect, her annoyance at a particular kind of homework problem, stabilizes a context-dependent epistemological stance she displays, about an unbridgeable gulf she perceives to exist between real and ideal circuits.