Introduction to Monograph: Achievement Emotions at University

Abstract

Introduction Research on achievement emotions has become a highly current topic in recent years (Davis & Levine, 2013; Romero et al., 2014), encouraged by the evolution from information processing paradigms – focused almost exclusively on cognitive and metacognitive variables – toward newer paradigms that take into account the importance of emotional and meta-emotional variables. Thus, several emotional variables (personal self-regulation, academic behavioral confidence, coping strategies, resilience and engagement) are being incorporated into classical cognitive and metacognitive models. The importance of emotional variables is being evaluated, as well as their interaction with cognitive variables and academic performance (de la Fuente et al. university setting, research and knowledge about the role of these emotional variables in cognitive and metacognitive processes proves to be increasingly valuable (Artino et al. The present monograph, titled Achievement Emotions at University, while not pretending to be exhaustive, makes its contribution by reviewing the present state of our knowledge, as well as disseminating new research evidence, and the development of recent innovation in this area. Different aspects are addressed. The first section is a review of the topic, a single article that analyzes the importance and evolution of this research topic. The second section presents new empirical studies, beginning with an article that shows the interactive effect of personal self-regulation, as a student variable, and regulatory teaching, a contextual variable, on students' academic behavioral confidence, as they complete a given teaching/learning process at university. The third article offers evidence of the relations between resilience and coping strategies in university students, showing different profiles according to their educational context (secular or religious), when coping with academic stress. A fourth article presents evidence of the relationship between burnout and competency acquisition at university. The third section, with its three articles, presents validation studies of two instruments for assessing achievement emotions at university. Finally, the last section is dedicated to presenting a new online self-help tool for assessing and improving behaviors for coping with academic stress in higher education, whether as a student or a graduate preparing for a professional exam.