The Role of Epistemic Emotions in Personal Epistemology and Self-Regulated Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to delineate the role of epistemic emotions in personal epistemology and self-regulated learning (SRL). We first review important tenets of personal epistemology and SRL and then present a model of SRL that situates personal epistemology within that model. We then define epistemic emotions, describe under what conditions epistemic emotions arise, and delineate how these emotions may facilitate or constrain learning processes and learning outcomes. Specifically, we present five antecedents to epistemic emotions and five consequences of those emotions during learning. The five antecedents are control, value, novelty, complexity, and achievement or impasses of epistemic aims. The five consequences are effects on planning and goal setting, motivation, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, learning outcomes, and revisions to antecedents. We end with a discussion of educational implications and future directions for research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the reviewers and Dr. Kathryn Wentzel for their extraordinarily detailed and thoughtful feedback throughout this process. The reviewers were particularly insightful and meticulous in their review, and we appreciate how much time and effort they put into crafting their feedback. Our original ideas were substantially improved due to their guidance.

Notes

¹ It is important to note that from a more traditional philosophical perspective, the sources of knowledge are far more diverse than what educational psychologists have typically explored (cf. Chinn, Buckland, & Samarapungavan, 2011). More contemporary perspectives on philosophical epistemology suggest there are six sources of knowledge: perception (i.e., extraction of information through the five senses), introspection (i.e., the attention the mind gives to itself and its own operations), memory, testimony (e.g., authority or experts), inference (through valid induction or deduction), and reason (Bernecker & Dretske, 2007).

² Typically, four areas are proposed for regulation, but we believe that motivation and affect should be separated, as they are psychologically distinct constructs (see Pekrun, 2006).

³ It is also important to note that epistemic emotions and motivation may be triggered at any phase in the model, but to reduce the complexity of the model, we have not represented them in Figure 1 across each phase.

⁴ Feelings can be emotional or nonemotional. Nonemotional feelings include physiologically derived feelings like pain, hunger, or thirst, as well as cognitive and metacognitive feelings such as judgments of knowing or learning (R. Pekrun, personal communication, November 28, 2017). Emotions compose feelings but also include other components as noted in the definition.

⁵ The converse is also predicted when the task is more authoritative, certain, and simple; individuals with less constructivist beliefs will experience congruence, whereas those with more constructivist beliefs will experience incongruence.

⁶ Perceptions of low control during complex tasks may lead to lower instances of these strategies, which may help explain why confusion is not always beneficial for learning.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this work was provided by a grant to Krista R. Muis from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2014-0155) and from the Canada Research Chair program.