1 Self-Efficacy beliefs and emotions in written reflections

Reflection as an aspect of intentional learning processes draws on and responds to prior experiences (Boud et al. 1985). Reflecting on teaching practice enhances the development of student teachers’ professional competences by creating situational awareness and fostering the ability to develop alternative methods of action in the classroom (Korthagen and Kessels 1999; Wyss 2008). The process of reflecting on teaching situations in teacher education is therefore important in the course of student teachers’ professionalization (see Lohse-Bossenz et al. 2019). Because teaching practice itself does not necessarily lead to understanding one’s (emotional) experience and drawing conclusions, reflecting on teaching experiences is important in teacher education as it allows student teachers to think more consciously about their emotional experiences in these achievement situations (see also Kubsch et al. 2022). Accordingly, emotions are relevant for as well as integral to reflecting on teaching experiences. Whereas research has widely shown reflection on teaching practice to matter for student teachers’ professionalization, little is known about the psychological processes underlying their reflections on teaching practice. Such knowledge would be important to better understand how reflection processes of student teachers can be effectively supported in teacher education. Therefore, we examine the role of achievement emotions in written reflections on student teachers’ practical teaching experiences.

As a central prerequisite for achievement, wellbeing, and accomplishment of one’s goals, emotions are important in psychological processes (Pekrun 2006). Research on secondary school students has demonstrated positive relations between enjoyment and self-efficacy beliefs (in the following: SE) (Bassi et al. 2007). Currently, it is unclear whether such associations could also be expected in teacher education—especially during reflections on practical experiences. Such research would enable a better understanding of how achievement emotions can enhance or impede learning processes in (young) adults. It would also enable educational practitioners to systematically use student teachers’ achievement emotions as information about their learning processes and a basis from which to provide learning contexts designed to better meet student teachers’ needs when learning.

Although self-reports are an established method of assessing emotions (Mauss and Robinson 2009), alternative methods allow researchers to measure emotions without directly asking the individual. Such alternative methods can therefore be more time-efficient and reduce participants’ time expenditure. One such alternative method is applied in the present study by using automatic text analysis (Pennebaker et al. 2015; Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010) to assess student teachers’ emotion word use in written reflections on teaching situations. These reflections may not be completely free of social bias, as they stem from a learning and achievement context. However, because student teachers were not specifically asked about their emotional experience, their emotions are not the direct object of the reflection. Thus, the assessment method might enrich research on emotions in achievement situations through an implicit assessment of such emotions. Against this background, the present study contributes to current research by using less-biased data, as well as (i) extending knowledge on psychological—and, more specifically, affective—processes—during reflection by examining student teachers’ positive and negative emotion wordFootnote 1 use in their written reflections on differently perceived teaching situations (mastery and challenging), and (ii) investigating how such psychological processes relate to professionalization processes by testing whether emotion word use in written reflections is associated with student teachers’ teaching-related SE at the end of one semester when controlling for different subscales of initial SE.

1.1 Teaching practice and written reflections in teacher education

Based on Dewey’s definition of reflective thinking (1933), reflection on teaching practice is defined as a complex process of investigating, better understanding, and improving (future) teaching practice by drawing on prior knowledge and experience. Reflections on teaching situations can be grouped into two types depending on the time of the reflection: Reflection-in-action takes place at the time of the teaching situation and prompts spontaneous changes in the behavior of the teacher, whereas reflection-on-action takes place after a teaching situation and enables teachers to develop behavioral strategies for the future (Schön 1987). Intentional and structured reflections-on-action follow a stepwise process. Kleinknecht and Gröschner (2016), for example, suggest a three-step reflection procedure consisting of (a) describing the teaching situation, (b) explaining their own behaviors, and (c) providing alternative ways to (re-)act. This three-step approach is an established way to systemize reflection processes (Kücholl and Lazarides 2021; Hußner et al. 2023; Kleinknecht and Gröschner 2016) and displays similarities to other structured reflection approaches for teacher education (e.g. Nowak et al. 2019).

Reflecting-on-action allows student teachers to connect knowledge about teaching with their teaching experiences (Korthagen 2010) and is relevant for student teachers’ professionalization (Wyss 2018). However, Wyss and Mahler (2021) report that reflection in teacher education is currently not living up to its full potential and should be supported step-by-step by teacher educators. Their findings strengthen the argument that, so far, little is known about the psychological processes that take place while reflecting on teaching practice.

1.2 Psychological processes during reflection on teaching practice: the role of emotions

One important aspect of psychological processes are affective experiences and characteristics; Pekrun’s (2006) Control-Value Theory (CVT) describes learners’ emotions in achievement-related situations (achievement emotions) as important predictors of their achievement. Further, achievement emotions are interrelated with control beliefs (e.g. SE in regard to certain tasks) and value beliefs (e.g. interest in certain tasks) in learning situations. Emotions are defined as (usually) transient episodes related to an event or situation consisting of joint affective, physiological, cognitive, motivational, and communicative components that act as triggers for specific actions (Shuman and Scherer 2014). Achievement emotions are prompted by learning situations and are conducive to their success (Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia 2014). Furthermore, achievement emotions can be defined in terms of their valence: Positive achievement emotions refer to pleasant states (e.g. enjoyment, pride) and negative achievement emotions refer to unpleasant states (e.g. anger, anxiety) (Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia 2014). These states can foster or hinder learning outcomes (Pekrun 2018; Pekrun et al. 2007) depending on their performance, emotional sequencing, and experience while learning (D’Mello and Graesser 2012). Especially emotion sequencing and on-task performance (i.e. Is the learner able to solve impasses?) relate to impeding or fostering learning in such a way that also negative emotions like confusion and frustration can positively impact learning outcomes (Baker et al. 2010; Braniecka et al. 2014; D’Mello and Graesser 2012). Furthermore, emotions may not only exist individually but simultaneously as mixed emotions (Moeller et al. 2018) with more ambiguous relations to learning performance (Braniecka et al. 2014) or meaning attribution (Tugade and Fredrickson 2004).

Research has widely examined the role of achievement emotions in students’ learning in school (e.g. Frenzel et al. 2007; Lazarides and Buchholz 2019; Goetz et al. 2010), but has only rarely examined their role in the context of teacher education (for an overview, see: Hascher and Waber 2020). As one of few, Ji et al. (2022) showed that positive emotions decrease and negative emotions increase during school internships. Additionally, Hascher and Hagenauer (2016) show that a decrease in anxiety relates to an increase in SE during school internships. Other studies (Porsch and Gollub 2018; Scott and Sutton 2009) also describe changes in emotional experience as well as the presence of various emotions during school internships, with positive emotions being the most prominent (Hascher and Wepf 2007).

Previous research has assessed teacher emotions in video-based learning settings either via self-reports (e.g. Kleinknecht and Schneider 2013), by analyzing non-verbal behavior during reflection (e.g. Chang et al. 2018), or by means of content analysis of open-answer questions (e.g. Kleinknecht and Poschinski 2014). Studies in experimental psychology provide evidence that emotions can also be detected in text based on the emotion dictionaries contained in the language analysis program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker et al. 2015; Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010). Relying on such a linguistic marker—namely positive and negative emotion word use in student teachers’ written reflections—could facilitate insights into psychological processes taking place during reflection on a large scale.

1.3 The role of emotions in reflection for professional development of student teachers: relations to self-efficacy beliefs

Research on (student) teachers’ emotions is scarce (Hascher and Waber 2020; Kleinknecht 2021); some studies examine the role of reflections in emotional involvement. For example, using a content-analysis of teachers’ reflections on their own teaching videos, Kleinknecht and Poschinski (2014) showed that negative emotions may hinder professional development based on a sample of ten in-service teachers. These findings align with results by Burić et al. (2020), who found negative emotions to be associated with lower teacher SE. Frenzel et al. (2016) also found negative relations between negative emotions (anxiety) and teachers’ SE (but not between the positive emotion ‘enjoyment’ and teachers’ SE). Moreover, Borrachero et al. (2013) showed that negative emotions were related to lower SE in pre-service physics teachers.

Regarding the role of achievement emotions in different stages of teachers’ professional development, it might be assumed that achievement emotions are particularly relevant in practical phases of teacher education, as student teachers often experience high pressure to accomplish (Dicke et al. 2016). An important question, therefore, is whether the described meaningful role of emotions in SE for teachers (e.g. Burić et al. 2020) also exists in samples of student teachers. This question is relevant for teacher education because higher SE of student teachers have been shown to reduce emotional exhaustion in practical phases (Kücholl et al. 2019) and to enhance effective teaching behaviors (for a review, see: Lazarides and Warner 2020).

SE can be developed based on four main sources: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and psychological and affective states (Bandura 1997). Teachers’ SE are understood as their beliefs about their executive ability to influence students’ learning processes, even in difficult situations (Tschannen-Moran and Hoy 2001; Tschannen-Moran et al. 1998). Teaching-related SE are differentiated into three dimensions: (a) student engagement, (b) instructional strategies, and (c) classroom management (Tschannen-Moran and Hoy 2001). Recent research has shown that this differentiation can also be applied to student teachers (Hußner et al. 2022). CVT proposes reciprocal interrelations between achievement emotions and SE (Pekrun 2006). SE are thus assumed to enhance or impede positive achievement emotions (e.g. enjoyment) and negative emotions (e.g. anxiety) (Camacho-Morles et al. 2019), but in turn learners’ emotions also affect their SE (Bassi et al. 2007). In the context of CVT (Pekrun 2006) and social cognitive theory (Bandura 1997), the present study investigates relations between student teachers’ achievement emotions and their teaching-related SE on the basis of written reflections on teaching situations perceived as (a) mastery and (b) challenging experiences.

1.4 The present study

In this study, we aim to identify interindividual psychological processes occurring during reflection-on-action in teacher education by combining theoretical assumptions of CVT and social-cognitive theory and applying them to reflection in teacher education. Against this background, to our knowledge this is the first study to systematically examine the relations between achievement emotions and SE of student teachers in the context of reflection processes during teacher education. Our study contributes to current research by (a) showing how achievement emotions during reflection processes interrelate with changes in student teachers’ teaching-related SE and thus (b) whether and how different valences of achievement emotions matter for motivational processes in student teachers’ written reflections. We extend existing research on reflection in teacher education by considering the situational variability of achievement emotions across teaching situations in written reflections and using alternative assessment methods of emotional experiences. In contrast to more traditional methods of assessment, e.g. self-reports and observations, our approach of using a dictionary-based automatic assessment is efficient and minimizes strain on student teachers.

In the current study, we examine the extent to which the use of positive and negative emotion words differs between teaching situations perceived as mastery and challenging. We expect that positive and negative emotion word use might not be equal across these differently perceived teaching situations, as emotions are highly variable and fluctuate depending on situational characteristics (Moeller et al. 2022). We also consider that negative emotions may be especially detrimental to professionalization when (student) teachers reflect on their own challenging teaching situations (Kleinknecht 2021). Therefore, when examining interrelations between positive and negative emotion words in written reflections on teaching situations and teaching-related SE, we consider whether student teachers perceived the teaching situation as a mastery experience or as challenging.

Given that mastery experiences are crucial for fostering SE (Bandura 1997; Schwarzer and Jerusalem 2002), reflecting on teaching experiences perceived as mastery situations has been shown to foster teaching-related SE (Gold et al. 2017). We therefore hypothesized that student teachers’ usage of positive emotion words in written reflections at the end of the semester would be positively related to teaching-related SE throughout the semester. We further assumed that the usage of negative emotion words in written reflections at the end of the semester would be negatively related to teaching-related SE throughout the semester. Against this background, we exploratively tested the following research questions and hypotheses:

RQ1

To what extent does student teachers’ emotion word use differ between teaching situations of differing degrees of challenge (situations perceived as mastery experiences vs. situations perceived as challenging)?

H1

We assumed that written reflections on different teaching situations (mastery vs. challenging) differ in terms of the emotion words used (positive vs. negative) insofar as more positive emotion words will be used in written reflections on teaching situations perceived as mastery, whereas more negative emotion words will be used in written reflections on teaching situations perceived as challenging.

RQ2

Is the use of emotion words in written reflections on different teaching situations at the end of the semester related to student teachers’ teaching-related SE over one semester?

H2

We hypothesized that student teachers’ use of positive emotion words in written reflections at the end of the semester would be positively related to teaching-related SE during the semester. We further assumed that the use of negative emotion words in written reflections at the end of the semester would be negatively related to teaching-related SE throughout the semester.

2 Methods

2.1 Sample

In the present study, we used data from N = 146 student teachers (53.6% female, Mage = 23.92, SD = 5.05; Msemester = 4.87, SD = 2.25) who participated in a practice-oriented seminar including a micro-teaching element. This seminar was chosen by the student teachers from a selection of seminars as part of the student teachers’ bachelor’s degree at a German university. The most represented subjects that the participating student teachers studied were German (12.72%), biology (10.40%), English (9.83%), PE (9.83%), math (7.51%), and ethics (7.51%). About a third of the participants had prior experience teaching in schools outside of university-organized practicums. Each student teacher prepared and taught one lesson in one of six German secondary schools within a school network. Student teachers subsequently reflected in written format on one teaching situation they perceived as mastery during the lesson and on another they perceived as challenging during the lesson. The student teachers reflected on teaching situations experienced by themselves or peer student teachers. To aid their reflection processes, the corresponding video recordings or written notes of the lessons were provided. The recordings or notes were not subject to analysis in the present study and only the reflection texts themselves were investigated. Testing for associations between emotion word use and reflection aid, we found no significant differences in emotion word use between different reflection aids (p > 0.128). In the first step, using exploratory analysis we identified and removed extreme outliers as well as cases of plagiarism among the written reflections. This resulted in a total sample of N = 239 written reflections on the micro-teaching element, of which n = 135 are reflection texts on mastery situations with a mean length of M = 422.04 words (SD = 227.00) and n = 104 are reflection texts on challenging situations with a mean length of M = 508.37 words (SD = 277.38).

2.2 Design and procedure

Data were collected in a seminar that was part of the educational science courses student teachers can attend during their studies. The seminar focused on learning and instruction as well as motivation-enhancing teaching. The seminar took place once a week over the course of one semester (13 weeks) and each class was 90 min long. The course design is depicted in Fig. 1. Student teachers who took the course participated in the research project if they gave written consent. Student teachers who agreed to participate reported their sociodemographic data and initial teaching-related SE at the beginning of the semester (T1, weeks 1 and 2). In the first five weeks, the student teachers received theoretical input on learning, instruction, and motivation-enhancing teaching combined with hands-on activities designing motivating lessons. In weeks 6 to 8, student teachers planned one lesson based on theoretical content learned in the course, and presented their lesson plans to their peers and seminar instructors from whom they received oral feedback they could then use to revise their lesson plan. During weeks 9 and 10, each student teacher taught their planned lesson at a German secondary school. In each lesson, a teacher observed the student teacher and gave feedback afterwards. The lessons were videotaped if parents and students in the classroom gave written consent. Otherwise, written notes of the lesson were made. In week 11, students returned to the university course and started to reflect on their lessons using the lesson videos or written notes. In the course of the reflection process, student teachers were asked to select a situation they had perceived as challenging and use the seminar session (week 11) to reflect in a written reflection statement (about one page) on this challenging situation. In week 12, student teachers were asked to select a situation they had perceived as mastery and reflected in a written reflection statement (about one page) on this mastery situation. Student teachers were not given any constraints regarding what rendered a situation mastery or challenging.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Study design during the practice-oriented seminar. (In weeks 3 to 5, theoretical input was offered; TRSEB teaching-related SE, * Student teachers reflected on a teaching situation)

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The reflection task was structured: Student teachers were instructed to follow the three-step process of describing, explaining, and providing alternatives for their reflections (Kleinknecht and Gröschner 2016). While describing, students were asked to focus on the teaching situation itself and on the behavior of all individuals involved in the teaching situation. Although they had evaluated the nature (mastery or challenging) of the situation beforehand, student teachers were instructed to initially only describe what happened in an objective manner without giving any explanation or evaluation of the situation chosen. The second step of the reflection consisted of providing (possible) explanations and reasons for the behavior and interactions of the people involved. This task specifically included explaining and evaluating student and student teacher behavior in the class. The final step of the reflection process focused on providing alternative behavior options the student teacher could have or should have pursued. The student teachers were instructed to offer behavior blueprints for future situations of a similar nature. Students were asked to reflect on the teaching situations in a free yet structured way. Apart from the three-step structure, students were not asked to explicitly focus on specific personal experiences, such as their emotional experience. In week 13, student teachers once more participated in a seminar session during which the seminar itself was evaluated. Additionally, teaching-related SE were assessed once more (T2).

2.3 Measures

2.3.1 Student teachers’ teaching-related self-efficacy beliefs

To assess the student teachers’ teaching-related SE, we used the German version of the Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale subscales of student engagement (e.g. “How much can you do to motivate students who show low interest in schoolwork?”), instructional strategies (e.g. “How well can you provide appropriate challenges for very capable students?”), and classroom management (e.g. “How much can you do to control disruptive behavior in the classroom?”) by Pfitzner-Eden et al. (2014), who provide a validated German version of the scale given by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (2001). Psychometric properties of the scales are reported in Table 1.

Table 1 Psychometrics for teaching-related SE at the beginning and end of one semester
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2.3.2 Emotion words

We separately analyzed each written reflection using the text analysis software LIWC (Pennebaker et al. 2015). The software relies on an internal default dictionary to categorize words in a given document and calculates the percentages of words that fall into these categories without considering the semantical context. We used the categories positive emotion words, e.g. “glücklich” (happy), “schön” (nice), “Erfolg” (success), “belohnt” (rewarded), and negative emotion words, e.g. “beleidigt” (offended), “schwer” (hard), “Kritik” (criticism). LIWC has been extensively validated (Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010). The most current German version of this dictionary released in 2018 (LIWC2015) exhibits good psychometric properties (Meier et al. 2018; Pennebaker et al. 2015). Descriptive statistics for emotion word use in the reflections on the two different teaching situations (mastery vs. challenging) are shown in Table 2.

Table 2 Descriptive statistics for emotion words in reflections on teaching situations perceived as mastery or challenging
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2.4 Statistical analyses

To test for differences in positive and negative emotion word use by student teachers in their written reflections on the two teaching situations (mastery vs. challenging) (H1), we conducted a series of Wald tests using Mplus 8.7 (Muthén and Muthén 1998–2017). To probe for the associations between emotion word use and teaching-related SE (H2), we specified three path models for each teaching-related SE subscale Mplus 8.7 (Muthén and Muthén 1998–2017). All analyses were conducted using a maximum likelihood estimator (MLR) and missing data were handled by employing full-information maximum likelihood (FIML) in Mplus 8.7 (Muthén and Muthén 1998–2017). In these path models, teaching-related SE at the end of the semester (T2) were regressed on positive emotion word use and negative emotion word use when reflecting on challenging situations, and positive emotion word use and negative emotion word use when reflecting on mastery situations. We controlled for initial teaching-related SE and gender (T1). Model fit was evaluated based on the guidelines by Hu and Bentler (1999) and Browne and Cudeck (1992) considering CFI values ≥ 0.90 and RMSEA ≤ 0.05 as acceptable.

3 Results

3.1 Descriptive statistics and correlations

Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations between all study variables are presented in Table 1, 2 and 3. We found that SE for instructional strategies (r(T1) = −0.22; p = 0.024) and SE for classroom management (r(T1) = −0.20; p = 0.038) at the beginning of the semester were negatively associated with negative emotion word use in reflections on teaching situations perceived as mastery. Higher initial teaching-related SE for instructional strategies and classroom management were associated with lower negative emotion word use in reflections on teaching situations perceived as mastery. Initial teaching-related SE for student engagement, however, were not statistically significantly related to emotion word use in written reflections across types of teaching situations.

Table 3 Bivariate correlations for analyzed variables
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A higher use of negative emotion words in reflections on teaching situations perceived as challenging was associated with lower teaching-related SE for instructional strategies at the end of one semester (r(T2) = −0.23; p = 0.044). In written reflections on as mastery perceived teaching situations, the use of both positive and negative emotion words was significantly associated with teaching-related SE at the end of the semester. Student teachers using more positive emotion words in their reflections on mastery situations reported lower teaching-related SE for all subscales at the end of the semester (rinstructional strategies (T2) = −0.21; p = 0.048; rclassroom management (T2) = −0.27; p = 0.009; rstudent engagement (T2) = −0.22; p = 0.039). Student teachers who used more negative emotion words in their written reflections on challenging situations also reported lower teaching-related SE at the end of the semester (rinstructional strategies (T2) = −0.33; p = 0.001; rclassroom management (T2) = −0.29; p = 0.004; rstudent engagement (T2) = −0.29; p = 0.005).

3.2 Differences between emotion word use when reflecting on teaching situations with different degrees of challenge

To test whether and how student teachers’ use of positive and negative emotion words in written reflections on teaching situations they perceived as mastery or challenging differed (H1), we conducted a series of Wald tests. Student teachers used significantly more positive emotion words when reflecting on teaching situations they perceived as mastery (M = 4.06, SD = 1.63) than when reflecting on teaching situations perceived as challenging (M = 3.22, SD = 1.34, χ2(1) = 22.26, p < 0.001, d = 0.56). In contrast, they used significantly more negative emotion words in written reflections on challenging teaching situations (M = 1.81, SD = 1.19) than in reflections on mastery teaching situations (M = 1.06, SD = 0.83, χ2(1) = 36.86, p < 0.001, d = 0.52). Student teachers generally used significantly more positive emotion words (Mmastery situation = 4.06; SD = 1.64; Mchallenging situation = 3.22, SD = 1.34) than negative emotion words (Mmastery situation = 1.06; SD = 0.83; Mchallenging situation = 1.81, SD = 1.19) across the situations they reflected on (Wald test for challenging situations—within-situation difference: χ2(1) = 73.25, p < 0.001, d = 1.10; Wald test for mastery situations—within-situation difference χ2(1) = 356.17, p < 0.001, d = 1.82).

3.3 Associations between emotion word use in written reflections on teaching situations and teaching-related self-efficacy beliefs

To test whether emotion word use in written reflections on teaching situations was associated with teaching-related SE at the end of the semester (H2), we specified three path models for each subscale of teaching-related SE (see Fig. 2). All path models had good model fit (teaching-related SE student engagement: χ2 = 52.15, df = 21, p < 0.001, CFI = 1.00, TLI = 1.00, RMSEA < 0.001, SRMR = 0.03; teaching-related SE Binstructional strategies: χ2 = 41.17, df = 21, p = 0.005, CFI = 1.00, TLI = 1.00, RMSEA < 0.001, SRMR = 0.03; teaching-related SE classroom management: χ2 = 52.39, df = 21, p < 0.001, CFI = 1.00, TLI = 1.00, RMSEA < 0.001, SRMR = 0.04).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Path model structure for Teaching-related SE for student engagement, instructional strategies, and classroom management. (P‑M positive emotion words in reflections on situations perceived as mastery, N‑M negative emotion words in reflections on situations perceived as mastery, P‑C positive emotion words in reflections on situations perceived as challenging, N‑C negative emotion words in reflections on situations perceived as challenging)

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All coefficients of the models are reported in Table 4. All three path models consistently showed a statistically significant negative relation between student teachers’ negative emotion word use—when reflecting on a mastery situation—with teaching-related SE at the end of the semester while controlling for teaching-related SE at the beginning of the semester. Thus, student teachers who used more negative emotion words when describing mastery teaching situations experienced lower levels of teaching-related SE at the end of a semester—even when controlling for their initial levels of teaching-related SE at the beginning of the semester. In contrast, we found no statistically significant associations with student teachers’ positive emotion word use when reflecting on a mastery situation. In addition, the results indicated no significant associations between teaching-related SE at the end of the semester and student teachers’ use of either positive emotion words or negative emotion words in written reflections on a challenging teaching situation.

Table 4 Results for the three specified path models
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While each subconstruct of the student teachers’ teaching-related SE at the second measurement occasion related to their initial teaching-related SE for the corresponding subconstruct, gender as the second controlling variable did not relate to teaching-related SE at the end of the semester.

4 Discussion

To examine the role that situational achievement emotions play in reflection processes, the present study aimed to investigate how student teachers’ positive and negative achievement emotions, by means of emotion words, in written reflections on different teaching situations relate to their teaching-related SE. First, we aimed to investigate to what extent emotion word use in written reflections on teaching situations differs between different types of situations (perceived as mastery or as challenging) in a reflection-on-action scenario. Second, we aimed to investigate how emotion word use in these reflections related to teaching-related SE at the end of the semester when controlling for initial teaching-related SE. Our findings suggest that student teachers’ emotion word use differs between reflections on differently perceived teaching situations (positive vs. challenging). Our findings also indicate that student teachers who use more negative emotion words in written reflections on mastery teaching situations might report lower teaching-related SE at the end of the semester. These findings will be discussed in more detail below.

Independent of how student teachers perceived the situation they reflected on, they used more positive than negative emotion words. Therefore, the variability of student teachers’ emotion word use in written reflections on teaching situations varying in their situational circumstances may not be as high as could have been expected. However, we did find statistically significant differences: Student teachers used significantly more negative emotion words in written reflections on situations perceived as challenging than in those perceived as mastery. Furthermore, they used significantly more positive emotion words than negative emotion words in written reflections on situations perceived as mastery. This logically aligns with negative or challenging situations evoking more negative emotions such as anxiety or frustration (e.g. a student teacher might feel frustrated because learners interrupted a lesson), whereas mastery situations evoke more positive emotions such as enjoyment and pride (e.g. a student teacher might feel proud because learners expressed enjoyment while working on a task designed by the student teacher). These findings are also in line with those by Ji et al. (2022), who reported that student teachers experience more positive emotions than negative emotions when writing diary reports on their teaching experiences in a school internship, with their most prominent positive emotions being caring, happy, and excited, while their most prominent negative emotions were nervous, tired, and distressed. It might be helpful to examine student teachers’ emotional experience in teaching situations at the time of action in the classroom, e.g. through experience sampling or biophysical measures, to gain a better understanding about which situations student teachers experience and perceive as mastery or challenging. Using both data from the time of action as well as the corresponding reflection-on-action (Schön 1987) would allow for a more diverse examination of student teachers’ experience from different perspectives and allow researchers to study changes in student teachers’ perception of a situation over time.

Examining relations between student teachers’ emotion word use in written reflections on teaching situations and their teaching-related SE at the end of one semester, we could only partially confirm our second hypothesis. Although, following CVT (Pekrun 2006), we hypothesized that positive achievement emotions would relate to higher teaching-related SE and negative achievement emotions to lower teaching-related SE, we could not find statistically significant relations between teaching-related SE and both emotional valences: Instead, our findings suggest that only negative emotion word use in written reflections on situations perceived as mastery are related to student teachers’ teaching-related SE at the end of one semester. These findings align with studies showing that teachers’ higher negative emotions were related to lower SE in (student) teachers (Burić et al. 2020; Borrachero et al. 2013; Frenzel et al. 2016), while positive emotions were not. However, our results do not confirm the implication that negative achievement emotion (words) in written reflections on challenging teaching situations are associated with lower teaching-related SE as an indicator of professional development, as suggested by Kleinknecht and Poschinski (2014).

One source of teaching-related SE is mastery experiences (i.e. experience of success in relation to teaching), thus teaching situations perceived as mastery should contribute to higher teaching-related SE. However, our findings suggest that situations perceived as mastery experiences are only of limited value to teaching-related SE when student teachers frequently express negative achievement emotions (by means of emotion words) in their written reflections. This association between negative emotion word use in written reflections on mastery situations and teaching-related SE could be caused by the notion of greater power attributed to bad events (and thus negative emotions) in comparison to good events (and thus positive emotions) (Baumeister et al. 2001) in the sense that the possible effects of negative (achievement) emotions may exceed those of positive (achievement) emotions. It is thus also possible that student teachers are efficient in disambiguating mastery and challenging teaching situations but may not experience mastery situations as such, for example due to insecurities, as indicated by their emotion word use.

4.1 Implications for pedagogical practice in teacher education

The present study provides empirical evidence that achievement emotions in written reflections differ between different types of teaching situations (mastery or challenging). We also add to existing research by showing that relations between emotional experience in achievement situations and teaching-related SE differ between reflections on teaching situations perceived as mastery as opposed to teaching situations perceived as challenging. More precisely, our findings show that teaching-related SE are negatively related to student teachers’ use of negative emotion words in written reflections on teaching situations they perceive as mastery experiences. Accordingly, student teachers’ written reflections provide a promising means to identify those at risk of negatively interpreting mastery situations. These student teachers should receive systematic support that enables them to accurately perceive mastery experiences in teaching. Our findings also indicate that student teachers might benefit from additional advice on how to better regulate negative achievement emotions not only when reflecting on challenging situations, but also when reflecting on mastery situations. In the future, research could focus in more detail on how the quality and/or quantity of reflection processes relate to changes in teaching-related SE to better disentangle effects of teaching experiences themselves and reflections on said experiences. Future research may also build on these findings by implementing automated feedback systems that guide student teachers’ reflections and help improve their teaching-related SE during practical phases in teacher education.

4.2 Limitations

The present study has different limitations that should be noted. The study was conducted at a German university and thus can only be generalized across different teacher education systems to a certain degree. Furthermore, the study design does not allow for implementing a control/waiting group. Additionally, no external raters were employed and the nature of the teaching situation was only determined by the student teachers themselves. These perceptions might differ from the perspective of external experts and might be informed by the student teachers’ emotional experiences at the time of action. Although student teachers’ reflections were based on different reflection aids (their own or a peer’s lesson video recording, written lesson notes), no statistically significant differences between reflection texts using different reflection aids were found (p > 0.128). Nevertheless, an experimental study testing whether reflecting on one’s own vs. other teaching situations perceived as mastery vs. challenging based on video recordings vs. texts differentially elicits emotional experiences could be insightful. Another limitation lies in the present study’s assessment of emotion words, which does not account for mixed emotions. Although LIWC has been validated (Meier et al. 2018; Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010), it uses lists assembling only a limited number of words thought to represent positive and negative emotions but does not consider semantic structures or phrasal context (e.g. negations) as it calculates relative scores on a word basis (instead of a phrase basis), which has led to some researchers criticizing its validity for the analysis of subjective emotional experience (Sun et al. 2020). Furthermore, because the student teachers were not asked to directly reflect on their emotions, their word use might tend to be more factual. Future research should therefore add to our findings by employing open-vocabulary approaches that do not rely on predefined dictionaries, but instead use a data-driven approach. Ideally, studies could combine both self-reports and automatic text analyses when assessing (achievement) emotions.

4.3 Conclusions

The present study advocates for research and teacher education to consider the situatedness of emotions in reflection processes of student teachers. We found that (a) emotion word use in written reflections on teaching situations differs between differently perceived teaching situations (mastery vs. challenging); and that (b) these situated emotional experiences in achievement situations relate to student teachers’ teaching-related SE in different ways. More precisely, our study shows that higher negative emotion word use in written reflections on situations perceived as mastery situations is associated with lower teaching-related SE at the end of one semester. To further examine situated emotions in more detail, methods such as experience sampling should be used to combine emotions of both reflection-in-action (experience sampling in the classroom) and reflection-on-action (using, for example, LIWC as we have in the present study). Furthermore, forthcoming digital technologies should be considered as opportunities to provide more individual systematic support to student teachers during reflection-on-action processes to help them develop higher levels of teaching-related SE. By emphasizing the situatedness of interrelations between achievement emotions and teaching-related SE, our study sheds light on the psychological processes that take place during reflection and can help explain under which circumstances reflection contributes to teacher professionalization.