• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.155-168
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• 2017

This study investigates how elementary students used cognitive-emotional rebuttals in the context of modeling activities, especially on how their emotional and cognitive processes lead them to use rebuttals in terms of epistemic affect. Twenty-five fifth grade elementary students participated in the study as part of their science class. During the course of their sixth periods, students constructed a human respiratory system model through continuous discussion. The research results showed that elementary students used an elaboration-oriented rebuttal, a defence-oriented rebuttal, and a blame-oriented rebuttal in their modeling activity. The elaboration-oriented rebuttal interspersed with negative epistemic affect was used to elaborate on a student's explanation, and a negative epistemic affect was elicited from their cognitive discrepancy. On the other hand, defence-oriented rebuttal and blame-oriented rebuttal entangled with negative epistemic affect were used to defeat the students rather than help rigor evaluation of students' explanation, and the negative epistemic affect was elicited from the other students' undesirable behavior. These results suggest that students' rebuttals can be elicited by epistemic dynamics related to the epistemic affect. The study shows that if negative epistemic affect were elicited from the other students' naive or false explanations, such an emotion is natural in terms of model construction, and the model can be further developed through the acceptance of the elaboration-oriented rebuttals by students' emotion regulation. In addition, we suggest that negative emotions aroused from the worsening of relationships during small group modeling activities are difficult to regulate and can have negative effects on students' cooperative model construction.