Commonalities and Differences in Strategies for Regulating Motivation and Emotion in Academic Settings: A Within-Person Approach

Abstract

Students’ motivation and emotion form important pillars of their educational experiences and, while representing distinct constructs, have been shown to be closely interlinked. Consequently, their regulation may be governed by similar mechanisms as well, but motivational regulation (MR) and emotion regulation (ER) have had little intersection. Moving towards integrative perspectives on these components of students’ self-regulation, we examined overlap and differences in regulatory strategies used to manage study-related motivation and emotion. In comparing MR and ER strategy taxonomies, we found evidence for commonalities, particularly among strategies pertaining to reappraisals of perceptions of personal ability/control over learning, as well as of learning-related values. MR and ER also contained several unique (i.e., non-overlapping) strategies. We hypothesized that MR and ER taxonomies are largely complementary in the sense that MR strategies can also be used to manage emotional problems and vice versa. This assumption was tested with 1,466 university students asked to report on their use of various strategies four hypothetical study problem scenarios (motivational/expectancy, motivational/value, emotion/expectancy, emotion/value). Using CFA and latent difference modeling, we found that strategy use was strongly correlated and differed little in terms of mean levels across regulatory problems varying in their motivational vs. emotional framing. Correlations and mean differences pertaining to framing were stronger respectively smaller as compared to those found for strategy use for expectancy- vs. value-related regulatory problems. The findings indicate that many regulatory strategies may be relevant for managing motivational and emotional problems of similar origin (expectancy vs. value) and underscore the need for joint perspectives on MR and ER to further our understanding of the interplay of different components of self-regulated learning.