Academic Emotions and Student Engagement

Emotions are ubiquitous in academic settings, and they profoundly affect students’ academic engagement and performance. In this chapter, we summarize the extant research on academic emotions and their linkages with students’ engagement. First, we outline relevant concepts of academic emotion, including achievement, epistemic, topic, and social emotions. Second, we discuss the impact of these emotions on students’ cognitive, motivational, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, and social-behavioral engagement, and on their academic performance. Next, we examine the origins of students’ academic emotions in terms of individual and contextual variables. Finally, we highlight the complexity of students’ emotions, focusing on reciprocal causation as well as regulation and treatment of these emotions. In conclusion, we discuss directions for future research, with a special emphasis on the need for educational design and intervention research targeting emotions.

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