Achievement Emotions: State of the Art, Challenges, and Future Directions

The talk will run from 11:00 – 12:00 on 16th June in room: 1.02 of the Education Building, on Maryland Street - Postcode: L1 9DE. The building is opposite Aldham Robarts Library and fully accessible.

After the talk, a catered reception will be held including: vegetarian/vegan and gluten-free options.

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Reinhard Pekrun - University of Essex, Australian Catholic University, and University of Munich

Emotions are ubiquitous in educational settings. Students frequently experience achievement emotions such as enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, or boredom at school and university. These emotions can profoundly influence their learning, performance, identity, and health. Nevertheless, traditionally achievement emotions have not received much attention by educational scientists. Test anxiety studies were a notable exception. More recently, however, there has been an affective turn; today these emotions are a hot topic in inquiry on education. In this talk, I will focus on the following issues. (1) Which emotions are experienced in academic settings, and how can they be measured? (2) Are achievement emotions functionally important for learning, achievement, and health? Test anxiety research has shown that anxiety can exert profound effects on performance; is this true for other achievement emotions as well? (3) How can we explain the development of these emotions, what are their individual and social origins? (4) Are achievement emotions universal, or do they differ between domains, genders, and cultures? (5) How can achievement emotions be regulated, and how can we design educational practices at school and university in emotionally sound ways? In closing, I will address open research problems, including the development of more sophisticated measures; strategies to integrate idiographic and nomothetic methodologies; and the need for educational intervention studies targeting achievement emotions and related change in educational policies and practices.

Biography

Reinhard Pekrun is Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney. His research areas include achievement emotion and motivation, personality development, and educational assessment and evaluation. Pekrun pioneered research on emotions in education and originated the Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions. He has published more than 350 books, articles, and chapters, and is listed among the top ten currently most highly cited educational researchers in the world. Pekrun is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the International Academy of Education, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He served as President of the Stress and Anxiety Research Society and Vice-President for Research and Teacher Education at the University of Munich, and he is active in policy development and implementation in education. Pekrun received the 2015 John G. Diefenbaker Award from the Canada Council which acknowledges outstanding research accomplishments across fields in the humanities and social sciences. He is also the recipient of the Sylvia Scribner Award 2017 (AERA, Division C), the EARLI Oeuvre Award 2017 (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction), and the Lifetime Achievement Award 2018 of the German Psychological Society.

Host or Publisher Faculty of Arts, Professional, and Social Studies at Liverpool John Moores