Assessing the role of students’ emotions on achievement

Abstract

In this regular issue, Street et al. (2022) present a study where they have explored the effect of students’ perceived task difficulty on the mathematics self-efficacy – performance relationship. The study adds important knowledge as it investigates students’ self-efficacy of different levels of task difficulty empirically, such as easy, medium difficulty and hard tasks and performances on a national mathematics test. The longitudinal study of 95 Norwegian students, in grade 8 and 9, demonstrated differential relationships between self-efficacy for different levels of task difficulty and national test performance. Further, the study found that grade 8 national test performances predicted grade 9 self-efficacy for medium and hard tasks but not for easy tasks. The authors emphasise the importance of supporting students’ engagement with challenging tasks to strengthen both their performance and self-efficacy. The second article in this regular issue also investigates students’ perceptions of emotions, both positive and negative and how they are linked to a range of outcomes (Jerrim, 2022). More specifically, the author uses data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in England and links the dataset to the National Pupil Database (NPD) to investigate students’ positive affect, negative affect and their fear of failure. One of the results reported is that low levels of positive affect, such as rarely feeling happy, lively or cheerful, is associated with a 0.10–0.15 standard deviation reduction in young people’s examination grades. Although little evidence is found for a link between negative affect or fear of failure and examination performance, the article raises some overall concerns: Students in England reported lower overall levels of life-satisfaction than their peers in almost all other developed countries (OECD, 2019). Knowing the impact of such emotions on students’ mental health long term, the author emphasises that well-being, mental health and young people’s overall emotional state have become a major political issue in England. The author argues, though, that policy and practice should focus upon these issues independently of its impact on results in high-stakes examinations or ILSA studies, but simply because students wellbeing is an important concern in its own right. In the third article, the authors investigated the item variance in PISA 2018 cognitive domains of reading, mathematics and science literacy (Marcq & Braeken, 2022). As the authors point out, International Large-Scale Assessment studies, such as PISA, mainly report average country achievement scores, while items are overlooked and rarely studied. Of particular interest is their key finding indicating ‘across domains and countries, it mattered more for the correctness of an item response which items were responded to by a pupil (27–35%) than which pupil responded to these items (10–12%) or which school the pupil attended (5–7%)’. The present article therefore offers an important example of what is possible to do ASSESSMENT IN EDUCATION: PRINCIPLES, POLICY & PRACTICE 2022, VOL. 29, NO. 3, 285–287 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2022.2110667