Features Of High School Students' Achievement Emotions And Their Relations With Achievement Goals

Achievement Emotions are defined as emotions tied directly to achievement activities or achievement outcomes. Researchers have found that achievement emotions are experienced frequently by middle school, high school, and university students and they are playing important roles in teaching and learning. Discussing systematically the structure and features of high school students'achievement emotions can supply theoretical foundation for their emotion health education. Achievement goals are purposes related one's engagement or beliefs related one's compliment in certain tasks. As highlighted in Linnenbrink and Pintrich's bidirectional model, achievement emotions and achievement goals may be linked by reciprocal causation, and discussing their relations can supply experimental support for students'adaptive goals adoption.In current study, based on data from Chinese high school students in Liaocheng and Binzhou, class-related achievement emotions questionnaires developed by Germany psychologist Reinhard Pekrun was revised. Using exploratory analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the structure of high school students'achievement emotions was attained. Then, features of high school students'achievement emotions were investigated by revised questionnaires and many statistical methods, such as analysis of variance and correlation analysis. Finally, relations between achievement emotions and achievement goals were investigated.The main findings in the above three studies are as follows:(1) Statistical results suggest that the reliability and validity of the revised questionnaire are acceptable. It can be used in Chinese context to measure high school students'achievement emotions.(2) The intense of high school students'achievement emotions were orderly, from the most to the least, as follows: pride, enjoyment, anxiety, boredom, shame and hopelessness.(3) There are significant gender differences in boredom, enjoyment, hopelessness and pride. Boys are higher than girls in negative emotions, such as boredom and hopelessness, while girls are higher than boys in positive emotions, such as enjoyment and pride.(4) There are significant grade differences in all these six achievement emotions. Senior high school students are higher than junior high school students in negative emotions, such as boredom, hopelessness, anxiety and shame, while junior high school students are higher than senior high school students in positive emotions, such as enjoyment and pride.(5) Negative emotions correlate negatively with mastery goals but positively with performance-avoid goals; positive emotions correlate positively with mastery goals but negatively with performance-avoid goals; enjoyment, anxiety,pride and shame correlate positively with performance-approach goals.