Abstract
This study examined undergraduate students’ reports of emotions and emotion regulation during studying from a self-regulated learning (SRL) perspective. Participants were 111 university students enrolled in a first-year course designed to teach skills in SRL. Students reflected on their emotional experiences during goal-directed studying episodes at three times over the semester. Measures included self-evaluations of goal attainment, emotion intensity ratings and open-ended descriptions of emotion regulation strategies. Findings generally revealed that positive emotions were positive predictors and negative emotions were negative predictors of self-evaluations of goal attainment, although positive emotions were associated with larger changes in self-evaluations. Boredom was analysed separately and was found to be a positive predictor at the between-person level but not a predictor at the within-person level. Finally, students reported (a) enacting a variety of strategies to regulate their emotions and (b) using a different strategy more often than the same strategy from one study session to the next.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under a standard research grant [grant number 410-2008-0700] awarded to Allyson F. Hadwin and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Master’s Scholarship awarded to Elizabeth A. Webster.