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Students’ self-regulation of emotions in mathematics: an analysis of meta-emotional knowledge and skills

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Abstract

Over the past decade, the concept of self-regulated learning has broadened to include motivational, volitional, and emotional components next to (meta-)cognitive ones. In this article, we present a meta-emotion perspective as an essential component of a conceptual framework on self-regulation that fully acknowledges the role of emotions. Against this background, a study is presented that attempts to contribute to the clarification of the relevance and the functioning of students’ meta-emotional knowledge and emotional regulation skills in school-related mathematical activities. It investigates the coping strategies that 393 students of the second (age 14) and fourth (age 16) year of secondary school report to use to regulate their emotions in three different mathematical school settings (i.e., a mathematics test, a difficult mathematics homework, and a difficult mathematics lesson). More specifically, it aims (1) to document the nature and frequency of the reported coping strategies, and (2) to explore—for the three different mathematical school settings—relationships between these reported coping strategies and personal characteristics (i.e., students’ familiarity with the particular school settings, their track in secondary education, their achievement level, their age, and gender). The results indicate that students report to know and to make use of several coping strategies in school-related mathematical activities, and reveal that the use of these strategies is related to specific person-related characteristics. In conclusion, we elaborate on how schools and teachers can stimulate students to acquire appropriate strategies and skills to self-regulate their emotions.

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Notes

  1. We choose to perform an exploratory analysis rather than a confirmatory analysis to be able to account for specific cultural characteristics related to the Flemish situation. After all, we had to make our own translation of the COPE questionnaire and to investigate its usefulness in the Flemish school context.

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Acknowledgments

The authors like to thank Inge Mercken for her help in collecting and analyzing the data of the study reported in this article. This research was partially supported by Grant GOA 2006/01 “Developing adaptive expertise in mathematics education” from the Research Fund K. U. Leuven, Belgium.

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Correspondence to Erik De Corte.

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De Corte, E., Depaepe, F., Op ’t Eynde, P. et al. Students’ self-regulation of emotions in mathematics: an analysis of meta-emotional knowledge and skills. ZDM Mathematics Education 43, 483–495 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-011-0333-6

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