Examining the Role of Enjoyment, Anxiety, and Emotional Intelligence in Online Graduate Students' Self-Regulated Learning

Abstract

As online learning continues to grow, particularly amid the COVID pandemic, so too has interest among educational practitioners and researchers to understand the personal and contextual factors that shape students’ emotions in these environments. The control-value theory of achievement emotions has emerged as a useful framework for examining the antecedents and consequences of different emotions that students experience in online learning. The purpose of the present study was to validate the assumptions of the control-value theory in an asynchronous online graduate program, and to examine the role of emotional intelligence in this social-cognitive process. Data were collected from 102 graduate students enrolled at a public university in the United States. Results showed that online self-efficacy was a significant predictor of achievement emotions (enjoyment and anxiety). However, student value appraisals of the online program only predicted anxiety. Hierarchical regression analyses also revealed that only anxiety was a significant predictor of self-regulated learning. Further moderation analyses were conducted and showed that emotional intelligence moderated the relationships between achievement emotions and self-regulated learning. The implications for research, theory, and practice are discussed.

Conscientiousness, prior experience, achievement emotions and academic procrastination in online learning environments

“…Prior studies have also shown that academic procrastination is more strongly correlated with negative emotions than positive emotions in remote settings (Henderikx et al, 2019; Rahimi & Vallerand, 2021). Third, enjoyment, in particular, has been selected by many studies to explore its role in relation to students' self‐regulatory processes in online learning environments (Artino & Jones, 2012; Henderikx et al, 2019; Touati, 2020; You & Kang, 2014). These studies have consistently shown that enjoyment is significantly correlated with students' adaptive and maladaptive self‐regulation in online learning environments.…”