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Achievement emotions have received increasing attention in research on adolescence and young adulthood, but little is known about these emotions in the early years of schooling. Studies addressing the development of different achievement emotions and their linkages with achievement during these years are largely lacking. The present longitudinal study aimed to fill this gap by examining the development of enjoyment, boredom, and anxiety in mathematics across second to fourth grade (N = 670 German students; Mage = 8.45 years, 51.0% female at baseline) as well as relations between these emotions and children's math achievement. Students' emotions during learning and when taking tests and exams in math, school grades in math, and math achievement test scores were measured in annual assessments. Latent structural equation modeling showed that enjoyment decreased, whereas boredom and anxiety remained relatively stable across these years. Moreover, the findings from reciprocal effects models (REMs) show that emotions and achievement were reciprocally linked over time, controlling for autoregressive effects, gender, and family socioeconomic status. Enjoyment positively predicted subsequent achievement, and achievement positively predicted subsequent enjoyment. Boredom and anxiety negatively predicted subsequent achievement, and achievement negatively predicted subsequent boredom and anxiety. The results were consistent across waves and achievement indicators and highlight the need to attend to students' achievement emotions during the early years of schooling. Directions for future research and implications for educational practice are discussed. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: This longitudinal study investigated how elementary school students' emotions toward math develop from Year 2 to 4 and how they relate to students' math performance. Anxiety and boredom remained at the same levels during this time, but enjoyment of math decreased. Emotions and math performance were linked over the years; enjoyment predicted improved performance, and anxiety and boredom predicted reduced performance, from one year to the next. High performance, in turn, predicted more enjoyment, and poor performance predicted anxiety and boredom. Thus, the findings suggest that providing students with opportunities for success will improve their emotions toward the subject, which will ultimately enhance their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on control-value theory (CVT), we examined longitudinal relations between students' control and value appraisals, three activity-related achievement emotions (enjoyment, anger, and boredom), and math achievement (N = 1,716 fifth and seventh grade students). We assessed appraisals and emotions with self-report measures of perceived competence in math, perceived value of math, and math emotions, and achievement with school grades in math. All variables were measured in each of three consecutive annual assessments. Using structural equation modeling, we tested the CVT proposition that appraisals, emotions, and achievement show reciprocal relations over time. We hypothesized that (a) control-value appraisals influence the emotions, (b) the emotions influence achievement, and (c) achievement reciprocally influences appraisals and emotions. Supporting these hypotheses, the findings show that students' perceived competence and perceived value positively predicted their subsequent enjoyment and negatively predicted their anger and boredom, controlling for prior levels of these variables, gender, and prior achievement. Students' enjoyment positively predicted subsequent math achievement; anger and boredom negatively predicted achievement. Achievement showed reciprocal positive predictive effects on subsequent perceived competence, value, and enjoyment, and negative effects on subsequent anger and boredom; the effects on enjoyment and boredom were significant from Time 1 to 2 only. As posited in CVT, the effects of achievement on the emotions were mediated by perceived competence. In sum, the findings suggest that enjoyment, anger, and boredom influence students' achievement in mathematics, and that control-value appraisals and achievement are important antecedents of these emotions. Implications for future research and educational practice are discussed. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: This study highlights the importance of students' control and value beliefs for their emotions during math learning. These emotions, in turn, impacted students' math achievement. Our findings suggest that promoting positive perceptions of control and value can be a powerful approach for fostering learners' positive emotional experiences and academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control-value theory proposes that achievement emotions impact achievement, and that achievement outcomes (i.e., success and failure) reciprocally influence the development of achievement emotions. Academic buoyancy is an adaptive response to minor academic adversity, and might, therefore, offer protection from achievement being undermined by negative achievement emotions. At present, however, there is little empirical evidence for these hypothesized relations. In this study we examined reciprocal relations between three achievement emotions (enjoyment, boredom, and anxiety) and test performance in the context of mathematics, and whether academic buoyancy moderated relations between these emotions and test performance. Data were collected from 1,242 primary school students (mean age = 9.3 years) over 4 waves within 1 school year. Achievement emotions (T1 and T3) and test performance (T2 and T4) were measured alternately. Academic buoyancy was measured at T3. A structural equation model showed negative relations of anxiety to subsequent test performance and negative relations of test performance to subsequent anxiety. Test performance also predicted enjoyment and boredom, but not vice versa. A latent-interaction structural equation model showed buoyancy moderated relations between anxiety and test performance. Test performance was highest when anxiety was low and buoyancy high. Practitioners should consider using interventions to reduce anxiety and downstream effects on achievement. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: In classroom settings, multiple emotions such as enjoyment, boredom, and anxiety may occur. Among these emotions, anxiety is especially important for students' achievement in mathematics according to this study with elementary schoolchildren. Reducing anxiety would be beneficial for students' achievement, for example through fostering their adaptive responses to failure and increasing perceptions of control. The findings also suggest that developing academic buoyancy can benefit the achievement of students with mild forms of anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic self-concept and achievement have been found to be reciprocally related across time. However, existing research has focused on self-concept and achievement scores that have been averaged over long time-periods. For the first time, the present study examined intraindividual (within-person) relations between momentary (state) self-concept and lesson-specific perceived achievement (i.e., self-reported comprehension) in students' everyday school life in real time using intensive longitudinal data. We conducted an experience-sampling (e-diary) study with 372 German secondary school students in Grades 9 and 10 over a period of 3 weeks after each mathematics lesson. Multilevel confirmatory factor analyses confirmed a two-factor between-level and within-level structure of the state measures. We used dynamic structural equation modeling to specify a multilevel first-order vector autoregressive model to examine the dynamic relations between self-concept and perceived achievement. We found significant reciprocal effects between academic self-concept and perceived achievement on a lesson-to-lesson basis. Further, we found that these relations were independent of students' gender, reasoning ability, or mathematics grades. We discuss implications for methodology, theory, and practice in self-concept research and educational psychology more generally. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: This study suggests that students' momentary perception of their mathematics ability (i.e., their state mathematics self-concept) directly influences their lesson-specific comprehension (i.e., perceived achievement) from mathematics lesson to mathematics lesson. In turn, state mathematics self-concept is itself influenced by students' previous perceived achievement (i.e., in showing reciprocal relations). Therefore, our results indicate that students' state mathematics self-concept makes a substantial contribution to their academic development in their everyday life at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of information and divergent viewpoints in the 21st century requires an educated citizenry with the ability to critically evaluate information and make informed decisions. To meet this demand, adaptive epistemic understandings and beliefs about the nature of knowledge are needed, such as believing that scientific knowledge is evolving (development of knowledge) and needs to be justified through experimentation (justification of knowledge). Our study is the first to use nationally representative samples from 72 countries/regions (PISA 2015 database; N = 514,119 students) to examine how scientific epistemic beliefs about development and justification of knowledge in science are associated with students' science motivation, achievement, and career aspirations in the STEM fields, as well as the cross-national generalizability of these relations. Results showed that (a) students who had more adaptive beliefs about knowledge being changeable and stemming from experimentation were likely to have high science self-efficacy, utility value, and particularly high intrinsic value; (b) epistemic beliefs were more strongly linked to science achievement than were motivational constructs; (c) the positive relation between epistemic beliefs and STEM-related career aspirations was largely explained by motivation and achievement; (d) the pattern of results generalized well across societies. Our findings suggest that epistemic beliefs are substantially positively associated with adolescents' science learning, implying that developing effective interventions that focus on development and justification of knowledge would be fruitful for promoting science educational outcomes. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: Holding adaptive epistemic beliefs about the nature of scientific knowledge is critical in distinguishing accurate and useful information from diverse, less trustworthy sources in the digital era. Based on data from more than half a million 15-year-old students from 72 countries/regions, we found that adolescents with more adaptive epistemic beliefs tend to have higher science achievement, feel more self-efficacious, be more intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to engage in science learning, and have higher aspirations to pursue a STEM-related career. Notably, epistemic beliefs are more strongly linked to science achievement than are motivational constructs. Consistent patterns across societies suggest that preparing students for 21st century challenges will require policy initiatives that ensure epistemic cognition is a core component of science education and scientific literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]