Academic Emotions in Students' Self-Regulated Learning and Achievement: A Program of Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Academic emotions have largely been neglected by educational psychology, with the exception of test anxiety. In five qualitative studies, it was found that students experience a rich diversity of emotions in academic settings. Anxiety was reported most often, but overall, positive emotions were described no less frequently than negative emotions. This chapter presents an overview of a research on students' academic emotions. In a series of five exploratory studies, it analyzes the emotions of school and university students by means of qualitative interviews and questionnaires. In accordance with theoretical expectations, the results of the five studies showed that students experience a wide range of emotions in academic settings. Whereas qualitative methods may be ideally suited to explore new fields, quantitative measures are needed for more rigorous tests of hypotheses. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that internal structures of trait academic emotions can differ between the emotions.