Emotions and Perceived Cognitive Effort in Short-Term Revision Following Written Corrective Feedback Among Beginning-Level Learners in Lower Secondary School Classrooms

Conducted in Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) junior high school classrooms with beginning-level learners, this study examined changes in students’ short-term revision accuracy within a teacher-guided written corrective feedback (WCF) procedure and explored associations between selected WCF engagement indicators and a 1-day revision outcome. Students received direct, unfocused WCF on a paragraph-length composition, completed an immediate revision while the corrected draft was visible, and completed a delayed revision the next day from a clean copy of the original draft. Perceived cognitive effort was treated as one limited self-report indicator of cognitive engagement, and six discrete emotions were treated as indicators of affective engagement. Behavioral engagement was not directly measured. Leow’s depth-of-processing framework informed the interpretation of the cognitive dimension, but the single effort item was not treated as an exhaustive measure of either depth of processing or cognitive engagement. Immediate-revision error counts were treated as a product-level measure of WCF-supported revision accuracy, whereas delayed-revision error counts and the error reduction percentage (ERP) were treated as product-level measures of 1-day same-text revision performance and net proportional error reduction. None of these measures was treated as an indicator of behavioral engagement, acquisition, or durable learning. Repeated-measures analyses showed large, statistically significant reductions in errors from the initial draft to both revisions. Exploratory associations were interpreted descriptively because of the small sample, brief retrospective measures, and mathematical derivation of ERP. Happiness showed a tentative descriptive association with ERP, whereas the positive-emotion composite and perceived cognitive effort showed no reliable associations. The cognitive and affective indicators were treated as conceptually related, but they were operationalized separately and examined only as exploratory correlates of the 1-day revision outcome. No interaction, mechanism, mediation, or moderation was tested. The findings provide cautious classroom-based evidence of short-term revision accuracy and underscore the need for longer-term outcomes and richer process measures.