Martyn’s LXD Blog

The A to Zee of LXD.

Welcome to the first of a series of posts where I’ll be covering some of the theories, principles, and methods I consider when designing learning experiences. Let’s start at A!

A is for… Affective Context.

Yes, I could have started with Artificial Intelligence, but there’s enough of that floating around the blogosphere, so I decided on Affective Context instead.

What is Affective Context?

Affective Context is the emotional and motivational situation in which learning happens. When a task feels personally relevant and curiosity-inducing, learners pay more attention, encode more strongly, and remember more later. The goal isn’t generic “positivity,” but designing the right feeling for the job (e.g., intrigue, urgency, empathy) aligned to the outcome.

Affective Context is important for learning experience design because:

• It enables a positive and engaging learning environment, encouraging learners to actively participate and explore new concepts.
• It supports learners’ emotional well-being, which can contribute to their overall success and satisfaction with the learning experience.
• It promotes a deeper understanding of the content, as emotions help learners create meaningful connections and associations.

Top tips for using Affective Context in your learning experience designs.

Here are some top tips for incorporating Affective Context into your learning experiences:

• Start with the problem they actually have. Use surveys or interviews to uncover what learners care about, their motivations and the constraints they face.
• Engineer curiosity, not just fun. Ask questions, pose dilemmas, or create information gaps before revealing answers.
• Make emotion serve the objective. If a story, image or activity doesn’t advance the outcome, cut it – otherwise you risk the “seductive details” effect.
• Support control × value. Give quick wins, choices, and a clear “why this matters now” (this is what educational psychologists call Control-Value Theory).
• Close the loop. Provide constructive, timely feedback during practice, and build in later retrieval checks so that emotion translates into durable learning.

Further reading.

If you’d like to dive deeper into Affective Context then I’d recommend that you watch this video – How People Learn: Affective Context – The First General Theory of Learning and/or read this book – How People Learn: A New Model of Learning and Cognition to Improve Performance and Education both created by Nick Shackleton-Jones.

See you next time when we’ll move on to B for…