Exploring Affective Outcomes in a Structured Online Problem-solving Learning Experience at University Level

We present the first findings of an online problem-solving experience for undergraduate students, attending a topology course within Bachelor of Mathematics, aiming to promote the construction of problem-solving competencies by using cognitive roles within thinking groups, with a magnifying lens on the affective level. The key idea of personifying by cognitive roles within thinking groups in a problem-solving process repre-sents the engine of an ongoing research on the construction of problem-solving undergraduate student’s competencies, begun with an analysis of some metacognitive aspects that students experienced by playing the roles. Each individual role corresponds to a cognitive function coming into play when a mathematician faces a problem. Each collective role corresponds to a problem-solving thinking process performed by a thinking group. To shed the light on student’s emotional outcomes and on the impact of the use of online learning environments on student’s affective dimension, we focus our qualitative analysis on student’s emotional experience both with respect to the structured problem-solving activities and the digital tools, coming out from some protocols, to understand if and how they foster conditions for developing emotional competencies according to Goldin’s idea of affective competencies.