‘Awesome to see the immense time before us on Earth’ - Students affective responses when interacting with a tree of life visualising evolutionary concepts

Despite the importance of emotions in science education, research on affect remains sparse. A promising direction is to explore the role of immersive visualisation in evoking affective responses. We investigate whether touch-based zooming interaction with a tabletop visualisation of the tree of life evokes various affective responses, particularly, the epistemic affective responses of awe, curiosity, surprise, and confusion. Ten students participated in semi-structured interviews while interacting with the visualisation. Verbal utterances and interactions with the visual interface were videorecorded. Students verbal and non-verbal affective responses in relation to five evolutionary themes were analysed. Results revealed that students expressed all four affective responses while engaging the zooming feature, with awe and surprise most frequently uttered. Most affective responses were associated with the themes of biological relationships and evolutionary time. Awe was highly associated with evolutionary time, surprise with biological relationships, and confusion with both these conceptual themes. For eight participants, awe was the initial affective response generated after exposure to the dynamic tree of life. The study demonstrates that interacting with an immersive visualisation through zooming can induce affective responses in relation to multiple conceptual themes in evolution. The findings provide insight into multidirectional interconnections between affect, dynamic visualisation, and biology concepts.
Funding Agencies|Orebro University, Vetenskapsradet [2012-5344, 729-2013-6871, 2019-03852]