Effects of classroom goal structures on student emotions at school

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to improve our understanding of classroom environment effect on student’s discrete emotions at school. Nine hundred and ten adolescents from 55 classrooms completed a self-reported questionnaire about five emotions (anger, boredom, anxiety, shame, and enjoyment) and their perceptions of classroom goal structures. Multilevel analyses showed that anger is negatively associated with mastery goal structure and positively associated with performance goal structure, boredom is negatively associated with mastery goal structure, and anxiety and shame are both positively associated with performance goal structure. Both individual perceptions and classroom-level indicators of goals structures were associated with emotions, but these effects varied according to the discrete emotion taken into account and to the level of analysis.