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Towards emotion awareness tools to support emotion and appraisal regulation in academic contexts

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Abstract

This paper studies learners’ emotion awareness in university level academic contexts as a first step to help learners regulate their emotions. Existing emotion awareness tools offer little information on learners’ emotions and their antecedents. This study created an emotion-reporting grid for university students based on the emotions they experienced daily. Students were interviewed based on their self-reported grid. A quantitative descriptive analysis of these retrospective interviews was conducted based on Pekrun’s control-value theory of achievement emotions. Student transcripts were analyzed based on the focus of their emotions (retrospective, activity, or prospective), the causes they attribute to their emotions (agent or external circumstances) and how they appraised the situation in which they experienced the emotions (value and control). We discuss the results with regard to the types of emotion-oriented and appraisal-oriented regulation strategies used in learning contexts and draw implications for the design of emotion awareness tools to support emotion regulation processes.

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Acknowledgements

Our research was conducted as part of the EmoViz project funded by the Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. We thank the students who volunteered to participate to this study.

Funding

This study was funded by the Region Auvergne Rhône-Alpes, Coopera Program (Grant Number 15.005444.01).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lyon, University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, iaelyon school of Management, CNRS, LIRIS, Lyon, France

    Elise Lavoué

  2. McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Maedeh Kazemitabar, Tenzin Doleck & Susanne P. Lajoie

  3. Université Lyon 1, LIRIS, CNRS 5205, 69622, Villeurbanne, France

    Rubiela Carrillo

  4. University of Geneva & Distance Learning University Switzerland, Geneva, Switzerland

    Gaëlle Molinari

Authors
  1. Elise Lavoué
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  2. Maedeh Kazemitabar
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  3. Tenzin Doleck
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  4. Susanne P. Lajoie
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  5. Rubiela Carrillo
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  6. Gaëlle Molinari
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elise Lavoué.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Emotion recording grid

figure a

Appendix 2: Interviews—coding schemes

Analysis: The analysis unit is an emotion felt by the participant.

Rules:

  • We keep only academic related emotions (not professional or personal), i.e. emotions students experienced in academic situations.

  • We keep non-academic emotions when accompanying academic related emotions.

  • If the emotion is formulated by the interviewer, we identify it as a unit if it is linked to the content of a participant’s sentence (not just rewording or inciting participant to develop ideas).

Categories for coding

Category

Value

Definition

Code

Example

Emotion (D’Mello et al. 2014)

Anxiety, boredom, confusion, curiosity, delight, engagement, frustration, surprise, neutral

Setting

Individual

The participant is working alone (even in class)

SI

“I was a bit anxious coz I had to do a lot of things”

Group

The participant is working in group

SG

“I was like bored and neutral because we were not doing anything”

Academic related emotions: object focus, causalities and appraisal (Pekrun 2006)

Object focus

Retrospective

Emotions pertain to the outcomes of achieved activities (e.g., pride or shame experienced after feedback of achievement)

Attention is on the past

OTR

“I felt like I was going through the work at a, at a decent rate, and yea, so I was happy about that”

Activity

Emotions felt during ongoing activities, the attentional focus is on the action, not on outcomes.

Attention is on the present

OTA

“I get frustrated because they started to talk about stuff I don’t remember”

Prospective

Emotions pertain to the outcomes of ongoing activities or activities to come (e.g., hope for success, anxiety of failure)

Attention is on the future

OTP

“a bit of like anxiety, coz like the exam coming up”

Agent

Self

Emotion is caused by the self

AS

“I felt anxiety, umm, because I’ve never, never did that before”

Others

Emotion is caused by other persons

AO

“I felt anxious when I realized that the others were stressed by the exams”

Group

Emotion is caused by the group, including the participant

AG

“I was not frustrating or exciting because we were not doing anything”

External circumstances

Emotion is caused by external circumstances (independent of self and others)

AC

“a bit of like anxiety, coz like the exam coming up”

Subjective value

Positive

Positive subjective value of activities and outcomes (e.g. high importance of success)

PV

“Yea I was actually interested in the material”

“This activity is very important for me”

Negative

Negative subjective value of activities and outcomes (e.g. low importance of success)

NV

“This course doesn’t matter for me”

“I’m not really interested in this course material.

Subjective control

High

High subjective control over achievement activities and their outcomes (e.g., expectations that persistence at studying can be enacted, and that it will lead to success)

HC

“I can do well in school if I want to”

“I felt engaged with the material. I actually understood”

“I feel very confident about this course, I have well prepared the exam”

Low

Low subjective control over achievement activities and their outcomes (e.g., few expectations about enaction of activities, and that it will lead to failure)

LC

“I can’t get good grades no matter what I do”

“I felt anxiety, umm, because I’ve never, never did that before, like applying for a lab, that I wasn’t really sure if I was qualified for”

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Lavoué, E., Kazemitabar, M., Doleck, T. et al. Towards emotion awareness tools to support emotion and appraisal regulation in academic contexts. Education Tech Research Dev 68, 269–292 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-019-09688-x

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