Using self-report to assess emotions in education

Self-report is a primary method to assess emotions. In research on emotions in education, self-report has traditionally been used to measure students’ test anxiety. Advances in test anxiety measurement have been at the forefront of methodological development in educational assessment. Emotions other than anxiety, however, were largely neglected. In this chapter, Pekrun describes how he got involved with test anxiety measurement and how this laid the foundations for constructing two multi-emotion instruments that he and his colleagues developed over the past 15 years: The Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) and the Epistemic Emotion Scales (EES). These instruments assess a broad range of positive and negative emotions that are important for students’ learning, including enjoyment, hope, pride, relief, surprise, curiosity, confusion, anger, anxiety, shame, frustration, hopelessness, and boredom. Pekrun describes the construction of these instruments, which was grounded in theory and guided by the findings of mixed-methods studies. In conclusion, he discusses advantages and problems of self-report of emotions and outline directions for future research.