Reciprocal Relations Between Students’ Achievement and Academic Emotions

• In Event: Exploring the Antecedents of Students’ Academic Emotions

Abstract

A theoretical model linking students’ academic achievement and emotional outcomes is proposed. Based on Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions, the model posits that students’ achievement and emotions reciprocally influence each other over time. In contrast to traditional unidirectional views addressing emotions as causes of achievement, the model emphasizes the importance of students’ academic achievement, and teachers’ feedback about achievement, for students’ emotional development. More specifically, it is posited that students’ academic achievement has positive effects on their enjoyment and pride, and negative effects on their anger, anxiety, shame, and hopelessness. Enjoyment and pride, in turn, are expected to positively influence subsequent achievement, whereas anger, anxiety, shame, and hopelessness are expected to negative affect achievement. Overall, these propositions imply reciprocal causation in terms of positive feedback looks between achievement and emotions.
In the present study, these hypotheses were tested for students’ emotions in the domain of mathematics, an academic domain that is critically important for their educational careers.
Data from the longitudinal Project for the Analysis of Learning and Achievement in Mathematics (PALMA) were used to examine the hypothesized reciprocal effects. The study used a representative student sample (N = 3,530 students, 49.7% female) including students from all three tracks of the Bavarian school system. Using annual assessments, we assessed students’ mathematics emotions (enjoyment, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom; Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Mathematics; Pekrun et al., 2011) and mathematics achievement (grades and objective performance scores) from grades 5 through 10. Students’ basic cognitive abilities and demographic variables (gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity) were also included in the analyses.
Structural equation modeling with MPlus (Version 7, Muthén & Muthén, 2012) was used to competitively test the proposed reciprocal effects models against autoregressive and unidirectional models while controlling for cognitive ability and demographic variables. The Mplus type=complex option was used to account for the nestedness of the data. The results show that reciprocal effects models for mathematics emotions were superior to autoregressive and unidirectional models, thus indicating that achievement and emotions reciprocally influenced each other over time. Achievement showed consistently positive effects on enjoyment and pride, and consistently negative effects on anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom across all six grade levels. These emotions, in turn, had consistent positive and negative effects, respectively, on subsequent achievement across all of the annual assessments.
These findings provide robust evidence for the proposed reciprocal links between achievement and emotions. Future research should examine the mediating links that produce these effects. From a broader educational perspective, the findings imply that researchers and practitioners alike would be well advised to focus more attention on the emotional antecedents and outcomes of students’ academic learning and attainment.

Authors

• Reinhard Pekrun, University of Essex

• Stephanie Lichtenfeld, University of Munich