Supporting Students’ Feelings About Learning: Attending to Negative Epistemic Emotions

Epistemic emotions are emotions that arise as students process the alignment or misalignment between new information and their existing knowledge or beliefs, or when they are engaged in learning tasks. Understanding how and why epistemic emotions are distinct from other types of affective experiences is important, because students cognitive and behavioral responses to these emotions strongly influence their engagement with those learning tasks and, subsequently, their achievement. In this article, we focus on two epistemic emotions that might be particularly powerful for students with learning disabilities: boredom and frustration. We explore how students with disabilities may experience these feelings in the classroom, and offer strategies that teachers can use to address these feelings.