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The Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) is a well-established instrument for measuring achievement emotions in educational research and beyond. Its popularity rests on the coverage of the component structure of various achievement emotions across different academic settings. However, this broad conceptual scope requires the administration of 6 to 12 items per scale (Mdn = 10), which limits the applicability of the AEQ in empirical studies that necessitate brief administration times. We therefore developed the AEQ-S, a short version of the AEQ, with only 4 items per scale that nevertheless maintain the conceptual scope of the instrument. We validated the AEQ-S based on a reanalysis of Pekrun, Goetz, Frenzel, Barchfeld, and Perry's (2011) dataset (N = 389 university students) and by administering them to a new and independent validation sample (N = 471 university students). Despite their brevity, the AEQ-S scales achieved satisfactory reliability and correlated substantially with the original AEQ scales. Moreover, structural relationships and intercorrelations between the scales and their relations with external measures of antecedents and outcomes of achievement emotions were highly similar for the AEQ-S and AEQ scales. These findings suggest that the AEQ-S is a suitable substitute for the AEQ when administration time is limited.

Relationship quality and emotional experience are both important constructs in learning environments but the question of how they are linked requires more attention in empirical research. We hypothesized reciprocal associations between student-teacher relationship quality (i.e., interpersonal closeness) and students' emotions in the classroom (i.e., enjoyment, pride, anxiety, anger, boredom, and shame). Data from a two-wave longitudinal study with annual assessments in grade 10 (Time 1) and 11 (Time 2) were used to test this hypothesis (N = 535; mean age at Time 1: 16.7 years, SD = 0.6). Student-perceived relationship quality and students’ emotions were assessed in the academic domains of mathematics, German, English, and French. In line with our hypothesis, cross-lagged panel models showed reciprocal associations: Higher relationship quality was associated with stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions over time. In turn, lower negative emotions and higher positive emotions were associated with higher relationship quality. The association between initial emotions and student-teacher relationship quality one year later was stronger than the reverse association. Further, the links between relationship quality and emotions were largely equivalent across school domains but differed in strength across emotions. Implications for future research and educational practice are discussed.

A comprehensive model of affect and motivation is necessary for disentangling the variance of subject-specific measures into components that are (a) construct-specific and generalize across different subjects, (b) subject-specific and common to different constructs, and (c) specific to a particular construct in a particular subject. In the present study, we developed and investigated an integrative model that yields new insights concerning the generality and school-subject-specificity of affective-motivational constructs. To this end, we first examined structural models that could account for the hierarchical and subject-specific nature of academic self-concept, anxiety, and interest, respectively. In a second step, we combined these construct-specific models to investigate an integrative model that was able to simultaneously address between- and within-subject relations. We used data from four large-scale samples of ninth-graders (N = 866–6146) on academic self-concept, interest, and anxiety in three subjects (mathematics, French, and German). Our results underscored the importance of the components at the more global level: The major part of reliable individual differences in subject-specific measures of affective-motivational constructs and their relations to achievement indicators (grades and standardized test scores) was explained by the general components of the affective-motivational constructs and the global affective-motivational appraisals of specific subjects rather than by the construct-and-subject-specific components. Overall, the structural architecture of the integrative model provides a way to simultaneously analyze complex within- and between-subject relations of affective-motivational constructs.

A domain-specific hierarchical conceptualization of mathematics achievement can be represented by the standard psychometric model in which a single latent dimension accounts for observed individual differences in scores on the respective subdomains (e.g., quantity). Alternatively, a fully hierarchical conceptualization of achievement can be represented by a nested-factor model in which individual differences in subdomain-specific scores are explained by both general student achievement and specific mathematics achievement. The authors applied both models to study the gender similarity hypothesis, the greater male variability hypothesis, and the masking hypothesis, which predicts that gender differences in general student achievement mask gender differences in both the means and the variability of specific mathematics achievement. Representative data were obtained from 275,369 15-year-old students in 41 countries. The results supported these hypotheses in most countries, demonstrating that a fully hierarchical conceptualization of achievement in terms of the nested-factor model significantly contributes to a better understanding of gender differences in the mean level, variability, and shape of students' achievement profiles.

Because testing time in educational research is typically scarce, the use of long scales to assess motivational-affective constructs can be problematic. The goal of the present study was to scrutinize the psychometric properties of short scales (with three items) and single-item measures for two core motivational-affective constructs (i.e., academic anxiety and academic self-concept) by conducting systematic comparisons with corresponding long scales across school subjects and within different subject domains (i.e., mathematics, German, French). Statistical analyses were based on representative data from 3879 ninth-grade students. All short forms possessed satisfactory levels of reliability (range: .75–.89) and substantial correlations with the long scales (range: .88–.97); correlational patterns with educational student characteristics (e.g., achievement, school satisfaction, gender, academic track, and socioeconomic status) were comparable to those obtained with the corresponding long scales (all average differences in correlations below .07). The correlational patterns between all single-item measures and the external criteria were similar to those obtained with the corresponding long scales (all average differences in correlations below .08), yet the single-item measures demonstrated low to modest score reliabilities (estimated with the model-based omega coefficient; range: .22–.72) and correlations with full scales (range: .50–.88). When long scales are not applicable, short forms and perhaps even single-item measures may represent psychometrically sound alternatives for assessing academic anxiety and academic self-concept for educational research purposes.

A key observation when assessing achievement motivation is that students demonstrate significant individual differences on corresponding measures and that these measures show a complex pattern of mutual associations. The central idea of structural models of achievement motivation is to formally and parsimoniously explain these individual differences and associations by a small number of latent constructs. A series of structural models were examined that make different predications how to capture the interplay between domain-specific and domain-general components of academic self-concepts, interests, and anxiety, respectively. Further, these various structural conceptualizations of academic self-concepts, interests, and anxiety were synthesized into several alternative integrative structural conceptualizations of achievement motivation that cover both cross-construct and cross-domain interplays. These structural models formally integrate the fragmented and diverse research on different constructs of achievement motivation across an array of subjects. The statistical analyses were based on representative data from 11,646 ninth-grade students.