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The present project explores the structure of students’ academic emotions with respect to potentially differential relations within and across subject domains, and the potential influence of critical, underlying antecedent variables (learning environment, cognitive appraisals) on these structural relations. In relation to current lines of research on academic emotions, this project intersects with research on educational psychology and empirical educational research. With the exceptions of research on emotions in achievement settings based on attribution theory (see Weiner, 1985, 2001) and an extensive body of research on test anxiety since the 1950s (Sarason & Mandler, 1952; Zeidner, 1998) academic emotions were largely neglected in educational research until the mid-1990s. Over the past ten years, the importance of academic emotions has been increasingly recognized as reflected in a discernable proliferation of theoretical and empirical contributions on emotions in education (see Efklides & Volet, 2005; Linnenbrink, 2006; Linnenbrink & Pekrun, in press; Schutz & Lanehart, 2002; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007).Despite this increase in empirical studies on academic emotions, a lack of knowledge remains concerning the structure of academic emotions, namely on their relations across and within academic domains. From a scientific perspective, between- and within-domain relations of academic emotions, and the potential predictive effects of critical antecedent variables, represent unexplored yet important topics for future research because of their potential contributions to our understanding of the structure of academic emotions. From an educational perspective, this knowledge is also relevant to teacher education curricula and the development of interventions aimed at improving teachers’ diagnostic competence concerning students’ emotions and their antecedents. Consequently, this research should serve to foster teachers’ knowledge about how to impact students’ emotions so as to foster positive and minimize negative emotions in the classroom.In light of shortcomings of previous research, the present project aims to contribute to the existing research gaps by focusing on the strength of between- and within-domain relations of students’ academic emotions as experienced in five academic domains (German, French, English, mathematics, history). The project will assess discrete emotions common to academic settings, namely enjoyment, pride, relaxation, anxiety, anger, shame, and boredom (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002). In so doing, the proposed research will (1) adopt a longitudinal design (grades 9 to 11), (2) assess of both habitual and state emotions, and (3) explicitly evaluate possible gender effects on between- and within-domain relations of academic emotional experiences. The proposed research also goes beyond previous studies on academic emotion relations in (4) investigating the influence of antecedents of academic emotions on the structural relations between students’ emotions both between and within academic domains as outlined in Pekrun’s (2006, 2009) control-value theory of academic emotions. Our sample consists of 9th to 11th graders assessed using (1) questionnaires to measure habitual constructs (N = 800), (2) a real-life assessment tool referred to as Experience Sampling to evaluate state constructs (N = 140 [subsample of the 800 students]; Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007), and (3) semi-structured qualitative interviews for in depth-analyses (N = 40 [subsample of the 800 students]). In sum, the proposed project aims to improve upon and extend previous research on the structural relations between academic emotions and their antecedents by addressing important theoretical concerns and adopting sophisticated research methods.
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