E-Tutorial Use And Students' Epistemic And Achievement Learning Emotions

This study explores the effect of epistemic and achievement learning emotions on student engagement and performance in a foundational business and economics course. We focus on the interaction between epistemic emotions, e-tutorial trace data, and achievement emotions within the context of a compulsory introductory mathematics and statistics course. Epistemic emotions, such as curiosity, confusion, frustration, and surprise, are crucial for cognitive engagement and learning retention but are often overlooked compared to achievement emotions like anxiety, boredom, hopelessness, and enjoyment. By employing dispositional learning analytics and analysing data from six cohorts of first-year students in the Netherlands, we examine how these emotions explain students' engagement with e-tutorials and subsequent academic performance. Our findings highlight the significant role of epistemic emotions in shaping students' learning behaviours and achievement emotions, which in turn affect their overall performance. Achievement emotions were measured using the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) and the Epistemic Emotion Scales (EES). Statistical analyses, including ANOVA and path modelling, show that epistemic emotions and behavioural data from e-tutorials are strong predictors of students' achievement emotions and performance. This research advocates for a more balanced approach in studying learning emotions, emphasizing the importance of both epistemic and achievement emotions in educational settings to
improve academic outcomes and student well-being.