Reinhard Pekrun

Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich (LMU); Australian Catholic University (ACU)

This study examined how adolescents' emotions in mathematics develop over time. Growth curve modeling was applied to longitudinal data collected annually from 2002 to 2006 (Grades 5-9; N = 3425 German adolescents; Mage = 11.7, 15.6 years at the first and last waves, respectively; 50.0% female). Results indicated that enjoyment and pride decreased o...

The emotion of boredom has sparked considerable interest in research on teaching and learning, but boredom during tests and exams has not yet been examined. Based on the control-value theory of achievement emotions, we hypothesized that students may experience significant levels of boredom during testing (“test boredom”; Hypothesis 1) and that test...

We juxtapose (positive and negative) compositional effects of school-average achievement and school-average socioeconomic status (SES) on students’ academic self-concept (ASC), final high-school grade-point-average (GPA), and long-term outcomes at age 26 (educational attainment and educational and occupational expectations). We used doubly-latent m...

Our work draws upon Foucault's idea that the order of things, defined as the way we categorise our world, matters for how we think about the world and ourselves. Specifically, and drawing upon Pekrun's control-value theory, we focus on the question of whether the way we individually order our world into categories influences how we think about our...

In many countries, examinations scheduled for summer 2020 were canceled as part of measures designed to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. To examine how four retrospective emotions about canceled examinations (relief, gratitude, disappointment, and anger) and one prospective emotion (test anxiety) were related to control-value appraisals, a...

There is a lack of research examining how students’ emotion regulation is linked to their well-being at school. To address this gap in the current literature, we examined reciprocal relations between two important emotion regulation strategies (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) and school-related well-being over 12 months across 2 s...

Conventional wisdom suggests that parents’ educational expectations (how far they expect their children to go) and aspirations (how far they want their children to go) positively impact academic outcomes and benefits from attending high-ability schools. However, here we juxtapose the following: largely positive effects of educational expectations (...

School victimization issues remain largely unresolved due to over-reliance on unidimensional conceptions of victimization and data from a few developed OECD countries. Thus, support for cross-national generalizability over multiple victimization components (relational, verbal, and physical) is weak. Our substantive–methodological synergy tests the...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Both self-regulation and external regulation are key to understanding adolescents’ learning and positive development at school. However, evidence on the joint development of self-regulated learning and externally related learning during adolescence is lacking. In addition, the current knowledge on interrelations between the development of adolescen...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1047241.].

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Emotions and motivation are important for learning and achievement in mathematics. In this paper, we present an overview of research on students’ emotions and motivation in mathematics. First, we briefly review how early research has developed into the current state-of-the-art and outline the following key characteristics of emotions and motivation...

This study used Pekrun’s control-value theory (CVT) as a framework to validate the Achievement Emotion Questionnaire – Second Language Learning (AEQ-L2L) for assessing eight student emotions in second language (L2) learning. We tested and validated the instrument in two samples using three waves of data, with a total number of 1,021 Chinese univers...

Background and aims: Traditionally, research in educational psychology has neglected the physiological foundations of motivation, emotion, engagement, and learning. Recent studies have made substantial progress to more fully consider physiological processes, as documented in the contributions to this special issue. In this commentary, I summarize...

We present a three-dimensional taxonomy of achievement emotions that considers valence, arousal, and object focus as core features of these emotions. By distinguishing between positive and negative emotions (valence), activating and deactivating emotions (arousal), and activity emotions, prospective outcome emotions, and retrospective outcome emoti...

Introduction Across four countries (Canada, USA, UK, and Italy), we explored the effects of persuasive messages on intended and actual preventive actions related to COVID-19, and the role of emotions as a potential mechanism for explaining these effects. Methods One thousand seventy-eight participants first reported their level of concern and emot...

Emotions are a central part of our existence. The nature, causes, and corollaries of emotions have been investigated in various scientific disciplines, from philosophy and sociology to psychology and biology. In this chapter we aim to contribute to our current understanding of emotions. We take a psychological perspective on emotions, with a partic...

Understanding the structure, antecedents, and outcomes of students’ emotions has become a topic of major interest in research on mathematics education. Much of this work is based on the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire—Mathematics (AEQ-M), a self-report instrument assessing students’ mathematics-related emotions. The AEQ-M measures seven emotions...

Peer victimization at school is a worldwide problem with profound implications for victims, bullies, and whole-school communities. Yet the 50-year quest to solve the problem has produced mostly disappointing results. A critical examination of current research reveals both pivotal limitations and potential solutions. Solutions include introducing ps...

Boredom is an established cause and correlate of eating behavior. Yet, existing work offers a scattered range of plausible motivations for why this is. We examined among 302 people representative of the adult UK population what motivations they had for selecting food during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this related to boredom. As predicted, bored...

Proofs as epistemic tools are central to mathematical practice, as they establish and provide explanations for the validity of mathematical statements. Considering the challenge that proof construction poses to learners of all ages, prior research has investigated its cognitive determinants, but the impact of affective-motivational experiences on p...

Studies like the 2015 rendition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA; OECD, 2017) document disquieting trends in students’ emotional development: On average, 66% of students reported frequently worrying about poor grades. At the same time, research has shown that students’ emotions can profoundly impact their learning and wel...

When individuals seek to learn about scientific information, they likely turn to the Internet. There, they will find multiple documents with conflicting points of view and varying degrees of accuracy. Integrating this information is challenging and may evoke epistemic emotions which may, in turn, influence how this information is integrated. Additi...

Research on situated motivation and emotion in education has made substantial progress, as documented in the contributions to this special issue. We discuss how this field can make further headway. First, we address the ambiguous meaning of the term situation and propose a 2 × 2 model of situational variation across time and context. From this mode...

Background: This study examined the relations between students' expectancies for success and a physiological component of test anxiety, salivary cortisol, during an authentic testing setting. Aims: The aim of the study was to better understand the connection between shifts in students' control appraisals and changes in the physiological componen...

Abschließende Zusammenfassung des Kapitels: Der Übergang vom Primar- in den Sekundarschulbereich beinhaltet eine Vielzahl an Veränderungen für Schüler*innen, die für deren kognitive, emotional-motivationale und soziale Entwicklung von zentraler Bedeutung sind. Hierzu gehören veränderte Schul- und Unterrichtsstrukturen (z.B. Fachlehrkraftsprinzip),...

Based on control-value theory, we expected reciprocal associations between school grades and students' achievement emotions. Existing research has employed between-person designs to examine links between grades and emotions, but has failed to analyze their within-person relations. Reanalyzing data used by Authors (2017) for between-person analysis,...

Both self-regulation and external regulation are key to understanding adolescents’ learning and positive development at school. However, evidence on the joint development of self-regulated learning and externally related learning during adolescence is largely lacking. The present multi-level longitudinal analysis (N = 1,542 German adolescents; annu...

Intensive longitudinal studies typically examine phenomena that vary across time, individuals, contexts, and other boundary conditions. This poses challenges to the conceptualization and identification of replicability and generalizability, which refer to the invariance of research findings across samples and contexts as crucial criteria for trustw...

Much research shows academic self-concept and achievement are reciprocally related over time, based on traditional longitudinal data cross-lag-panel models (CLPM) supporting a reciprocal effects model (REM). However, recent research has challenged CLPM's appropriateness, arguing that CLPMs with random intercepts (RI-CLPMs) provide a more robust (wi...

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....

The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...

Achievement emotions are important educational constructs. They predict outcomes such as students’ achievement, persistence, and drop-out intentions. Thus, it is crucial to examine the factors that determine these emotions. In this study, we focus specifically on the positive emotion of enjoyment as past research has largely focused on negative emo...

This volume concerns emotional development and includes contributions from leading experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, sociology, primatology, philosophy, history, cognitive science, computer science, and education. This is the first volume of its kind to include such a multidisciplinary group of experts to consider emotional develop...

Children and adolescents frequently experience emotions such as enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, or boredom in school. Similarly, achievement situations at work or in sports during adulthood can evoke intense emotions. Using Pekrun’s (2006, 2021) control-value theory of achievement emotions as a theoretical framework, this chapter rev...

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...

The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), the negative effect of school-/class-average achievement on academic self-concept, is one of educational psychology’s most universal findings. However, critiques of this research have proposed moderators based on achievement motivation theories. Nevertheless, because these motivational theories are not suffi...

Current victimization studies and meta-analyses are based mainly on a unidimensional perspective in a few developed OECD countries. This provides a weak basis for generalizability over multiple victimization (relational, verbal, physical) components and different countries. We test the cross-national generalizability (594,196 fifteen-year-olds; 77...

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 an...

Murphy (2021) argues that the field of Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology needs to pay more attention to descriptive statistics (“Table 1”; e.g., M, SD, reliability, correlations) when reporting and interpreting results. We agree that authors need to present a clear and transparent description of their data and that descriptive statistics a...

It is plausible to assume that teachers need motivation, emotions, and self-regulation to teach and promote students’ learning. However, as documented in this special issue, extant research is inconsistent and has documented weak effects of these teacher variables at best. I discuss possible reasons for this paradoxical failure to more fully docume...

Achievement emotions are emotions linked to academic, work, or sports achievement activities (activity emotions) and their success and failure outcomes (outcome emotions). Recent evidence suggests that achievement emotions are linked to motivational, self-regulatory, and cognitive processes that are crucial for academic success. Despite the importa...

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...

Reading texts can prompt intense emotions, and these emotions profoundly influence learning from texts. I first discuss the findings from the eight studies reported in this special issue. The studies represent pivotal advances in research on reading. Focusing on learning from science texts, they show that different emotions and different types of t...

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 evol...

Existing research shows consistent links between boredom and depression, somatic complaints, substance abuse, or obesity and eating disorders. However, comparatively little is known about potential psychological and physical health-related correlates of academic boredom. Evidence for such a relationship can be derived from the literature, as boredo...

Test anxiety is a widespread and mostly detrimental emotion in learning and achievement settings. Thus, it is a construct of high interest for researchers and its measurement is an important issue. So far, test anxiety has typically been assessed using self-report measures. However, physiological measures (e.g., heart rate or skin conductance level...

Existing research shows consistent links between boredom and depression, somatic complaints, substance abuse, or obesity and eating disorders. However, comparatively little is known about potential psychological and physical health-related correlates of academic boredom. Evidence for such a relationship can be derived from literature, as boredom ha...

Epistemic emotions such as surprise, curiosity, and confusion occur during epistemic cognitive activities. They result from cognitive appraisals about the (mis-)alignment between new information and existing knowledge or beliefs. More specifically, epistemic emotions can be triggered by discrepant or contradictory information that prompts cognitive...

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....

Achievement Emotions in School Settings: Theoretical Foundations and Current Evidence

Control-value theory (CVT) posits that cognitive appraisals and emotions govern motivation and learning in achievement settings. Within this framework, we used latent profile analysis to identify multifaceted motivation profiles involving academic control and value appraisals and achievement emotions (boredom, anxiety, enjoyment). Three motivation...

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...

Existing research shows that high achievement boredom is correlated with a range of undesirable behavioral and personality variables and that the main antecedents of boredom are being over-or under-challenged. However, merely knowing that students are highly bored, without taking their achievement level into account, might be insufficient for drawi...

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 negat...

Background Promoting well-being and preventing poor mental health in young people is a major global priority. Building emotional competence (EC) skills via a mobile app may be an effective, scalable and acceptable way to do this. However, few large-scale controlled trials have examined the efficacy of mobile apps in promoting mental health in youn...

Dieses Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit Emotionen im Lern- und Leistungskontext. Fragen Sie sich doch einmal selbst – wie fühlen Sie sich, während Sie die Inhalte dieses Lehrbuchs durcharbeiten? Macht Ihnen diese Aufgabe Spaß? Ärgern Sie sich dabei? Und der Gedanke daran, dass Ihre Lernergebnisse überprüft werden: Jagt er Ihnen einen Schauer über den R...

Background Appraisals of control and value are proposed as proximal antecedents of achievement emotions, which, in turn, predict achievement. Relatively few studies have investigated how control and value may interact to determine achievement emotions, or subsequent achievement mediated by emotions. Aim To examine whether control, value, and their...

Proliferating information and viewpoints in the 21st century require an educated citizenry with the ability to understand scientific knowledge but also to comprehend “what is science” - nature of science (NOS). We present a global investigation of how NOS views are associated with science learning across 72 countries for 514,119 adolescents. Adoles...

Existing research shows that high scholastic boredom is correlated with a range of undesirable behaviors and personality traits and that the main antecedents of boredom are being over- or under-challenged. No study to date, though, seems to have systematically compared students who are highly bored and low-achieving (thus, likely over-challenged) w...

Testing assumptions proposed by Frenzel’s reciprocal model of teacher emotions (e.g., Frenzel, 2014), this study explored relations between teachers’ appraisals concerning the attainment and importance of their teaching goals, and their emotions. Specifically, we addressed teachers’ goals of high student performance, motivation, discipline, and hig...

Mit der zunehmenden Verbreitung von Lerntechnologien in schulischen, universitären und betrieblichen Kontexten ist auch das wissenschaftliche Interesse an der Rolle von Emotionen beim technologiebasierten Lernen gestiegen. Diese Entwicklung ist eng mit dem Ziel verbunden, emotional anregende Lernumgebungen zu entwickeln, die Lernende nachhaltig mot...

Verifying that conceptualisations of emotions are consistent across languages and cultures is a critical precondition for meaningful cross-cultural research on emotional experience. For achievement-related emotions tied to successes or failures, such evidence is virtually non-existent. To address this gap, we compared Canadian, German, Colombian, a...

While self-report measures are ubiquitous in the educational research literature, the benefits of self-report are often maligned. Rather than discarding or ignoring data generated from self-report measures of cognitive processing and motivation, research is needed to determine when and if self-report measures can contribute to our collective unders...

Self-report is required to assess mental states in nuanced ways. By implication, self-report is indispensable to capture the psychological processes driving human learning, such as learners’ emotions, motivation, strategy use, and metacognition. As shown in the contributions to this special issue, self-report related to learning shows convergent an...

Expectancy-value theory (EVT) is a popular framework to understand and improve students' motivation. Unfortunately, limited research has verified whether EVT predictions generalize to students with low levels of cognitive ability. This study relies on Grade 5 and 8 data from 177 students with low levels of cognitive ability and a matched sample of...

Using control-value theory as a conceptual framework, we review the literature on the role of emotions in learning from multiple inputs. We first provide a conceptual definition of emotion and an overview of the different types of emotions that play a role during learning, including achievement, epistemic, topic, and social emotions. Next, we discu...

The concept of self is central to personhood, but personality research has largely ignored the relevance of recent advances in self‐concept theory: multidimensionality of self‐concept (focusing instead on self‐esteem, an implicit unidimensional approach), domain specificity (generalizability of trait manifestations over different domains), and mult...

Curiosity and interest are at the core of human inquiry. However, controversies remain about how best to conceptualize these constructs. I propose to derive definitions by attending to the common core of typical usages of the two terms. Using this approach, curiosity can be defined as a psychological state that includes three components: recognitio...