Academic Emotions Affecting Senior High School Students’

Self-Regulated Learning and Achievement,

North Fairview High School

THE EXPLORERS: LIM – DIAZ – JUSAYAN – NEO – PELENIO – DE GULA- LIM

Introduction
A rich diversity of senior high schools and or other institutions have a special responsibility to
train students and other personnel to be fit for the practice in a particular track. Research indicates that
one of the major goals of formal education is to equip students with self-regulatory skills. These skills
are viewed as very necessary in guiding one’s own learning during formal schooling. This aspect of
learning has been referred to as “self-regulated learning (SRL)”. Pintrich (1996) defines SRL as a process
whereby students set their own goals and regulate, monitor and control their own cognitive behavior.

On the other hand, academic emotions are students’ reactions to situations usually tied directly
to academic learning, classroom instruction, and achievement. Two important dimensions are used to
describe emotions, and these are valence (positive or negative) and activation (activating or
deactivating). Based on such classification, Pekrun (1996) derived four broad categories of academic
emotions: Activating positive emotions (e.g., joy, hope), deactivating positive emotions (e.g., relief,
relaxation), activating negative emotions (e.g., anger, anxiety) and deactivating negative emotions (e.g.,
hopelessness, boredom). Students experience academic emotions differently. Academic emotions are
also considered to be organized in domain specific ways. This means that academic emotions are
experienced in a different manner for different school academic subjects. The assumption has been
supported by literature. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude that because students experience
enjoyment in one subject, they would also experience the same emotion in other subjects.

Furthermore, judging from the general functions of emotions for human agency, it may be
assumed that emotions influence senior high school students’ cognitive processes and performance, as
well as their psychological and physical health.

In particular, this perspective is warranted for emotions that are directly linked to academic
learning, classroom instruction, and achievement (e.g., enjoyment of learning, pride of success, or test-
related anxiety). The researchers propose to use the term academic emotions to denote such emotions.
By defining academic emotions in this way, the term academic is used as is commonly done with terms
such as academic motivation or academic self-concept.

To this date, a number of studies have been conducted on SRL, but the complexity of it still
remains, such as factors that affect the effectiveness of self-regulation among various students in
various fields of study. In an attempt to find out about this complexity, personal factors such as
emotions, together with some motivational beliefs of self-efficacy and task value, come into play. Schutz
and Pekrun (1993) claim that emotions are vital predictors of students’ self-regulation. A number of
empirical studies provide a general support for the claim that emotions influence learning.

On the contrary, although a growing body of both theoretical and empirical literature exists on
academic emotions and SRL as separate aspects within learning, empirical evidence on the role of
emotions on SRL still remains scanty. As Artino et al. (2000) notes, academic emotions have largely been
neglected by educational literature, with the exception of test anxiety. Instead, secondary education
literature tends to focus mostly on cognitive factors such as prior academic achievement, which do not
explain much on the variance in academic outcomes. Yet, a large body of secondary education literature
on emotions indicates that many Senior High School students experience stressful situations during their
education resulting to depression and anxiety. There has been very little attempt to look at how these
emotions influence students’ SRL.

Consequently, this study predominantly aims to address these issues at North Fairview Senior
High School in Quezon City. It is one of the public high schools that offers a senior high school program.
First, the researchers investigated students’ class-related emotional experiences, their motivation and
their use of self-regulated strategies. Since the majority of the students belong to the graduating class,
they are more likely to experience such emotions. Then, the researchers investigated whether these
emotions have associations with students’ motivation and strategy use, as well as whether motivational
beliefs have associations with strategy use.

In line with this, the researchers, being students, will surely be personally benefited from the
results of this study and might as well be a way in informing the school administrators to have an in-
depth knowledge about this matter in order to fully address the dilemma that the senior high school
students are continuously facing.