Chinese students' domain- and lesson-specific academic emotions in mathematics

Abstract

Chinese students outperform their peers in mathematics, but they struggle with emotional and attitude aspects, exhibiting lower levels of enjoyment and confidence, along with heightened mathematics anxiety. As the grade progresses, students' emotional connection to mathematics tends to diminish, especially when transitioning from primary to middle school. Emotions are ubiquitous in the classroom and closely related to aspects of learning. This study aims to identify the distributions and antecedents of academic emotions among secondary school students in mathematics. Study One used a person-centred approach to investigate students’ habitual emotional distributions among different appraisal profiles. The results identified four appraisal profiles: extrinsic-value orientation (4.9%), negative (13.4%), control orientation (41.3%), and positive (40.4%). Students with a positive profile showed the best emotional performance, followed by those with a control orientation. In contrast, students with the extrinsic-value orientation profile exhibited the worst emotional performance. The four profiles also showed significant correlations with the background data of students. Study Two examined the proximal and distal antecedent factors of academic emotions using the daily diary method. Findings at within- and between-person levels confirmed the relation among teaching, appraisals and emotions; notwithstanding, the mediation effect was partial. Besides, the effects of teaching on emotions within students were smaller than those at the between-person level. Lastly, a closer relation between generic instruction and academic emotions was observed compared with content-focused instruction. Study Three examined whether relational concerns are linked to self-reported domain- and lesson-specific emotions in Studies One and Two. The results showed that domain-specific emotions assessed with traditional questionnaire surveys were related to relational concerns, while daily reports were not. Besides, how relational concerns were related to domain-specific emotions via control-value appraisals was tested. The findings revealed that relational concerns had an unfavourable effect on negative emotions directly. However, relational concerns were favourably linked to positive emotions primarily via intrinsic value. Study Four explored the relation between students’ facial expressions and self-reported emotions. The relation between sets of facial action units and emotions is partly consistent with the hypothesis proposed in the Facial Action Coding System. Three types of facial expressions, positive, negative and positive surprise (or interest), were identified based on action units. Positive facial expressions showed no relation with all academic emotions. The relation between negative facial expressions and self-reported emotions aligned with the valence, though it was not statistically significant. Besides, positive surprise showed favourable relations with enjoyment and relaxation. Lastly, several significant relations between three facial expressions and control-value appraisals were also obtained. In conclusion, the findings uncovered that many Chinese students lacked academic value in mathematics; however, mathematical value played a vital role in arousing academic emotions among students. Besides, supportive, activating and interactive teaching had close relations with students' academic emotions. Students' habitual emotions (i.e., domain-specific emotions) reflect core cultural ideas (i.e., harmony and interdependence). Lastly, facial expressions showed a mild relation with self-reported emotions. These findings are essential to comprehensively understand students’ emotions in mathematics and provide empirical evidence for future studies.