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Copyright@ Australian Catholic University 1998-2025 | ABN 15 050 192 660 CRICOS registered provider: 00004G | PRV12008
Copyright@ Australian Catholic University 1998-2025 | ABN 15 050 192 660 CRICOS registered provider: 00004G | PRV12008
Picture an exam hall at a school or university somewhere in Australia, or indeed anywhere in the world. Some of the students present in the hall are showing the telltale signs of test anxiety: nervous fidgeting, excessive sweating, increased heart rate and even nausea.
From the days when testing became a fixture of the educational system, students have struggled with exam-related anxiety.
Researchers have been interested in this phenomenon since the 1930s, when the growth of testing culture was making educational opportunities and life prospects dependent on individual success or failure on exams. One of the earliest known studies, published in 1938, observed that students were becoming “more and more disturbed over taking examinations”.
“In those days, researchers in America, Russia and Germany realised there was an issue, because more than a third of students were suffering from excessive anxiety and panic in these situations, which then reduces their performance,” says Reinhard Pekrun, Professorial Fellow at ACU’s Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, and a leading expert on achievement emotions.
“Their interest was focused on anxiety because it was the one emotion that seemed to be most prominent in test-related experiences, and if anxiety affects a participant to the point where it hinders their ability to perform well, the test may no longer be valid.”
For several decades, test anxiety remained a hot topic among psychological scientists and educational experts. Indeed, it was still the subject du jour for personality researchers when Reinhard Pekrun entered the field in the 1980s.
“It was fascinating to me because it was interdisciplinary, it’s about psychology, education and the occupational world, and it also has medical facets,” says Professor Pekrun, who was an early member and later a president of the Society for Test Anxiety Research (STAR), now known as the Stress, Trauma, Anxiety and Resilience Society.
Over time, he and his contemporaries realised that anxiety had absorbed their energy to the extent that they had neglected other emotions present among test-takers.
“We asked ourselves, ‘Is anxiety the one and only feeling that affects people in these situations?’ And we started to look beyond anxiety towards other emotions like anger, despair, joy and pride.”
Ironically, it was two common but contrasting emotions – boredom and curiosity – that led Professor Pekrun to expand his research focus.
“To be honest with you, after having worked on test anxiety research for some 15 years, I was a bit bored because there wasn’t much innovation going on and it felt like we were running around in circles,” he says. “Alongside that boredom, I also felt an intense curiosity about the question: ‘What else is going on in the world of emotions?’”
His exploratory research would show that beyond anxiety, other achievement emotions – emotions that relate to success and failure in achievement activities – are part of the story of how students feel in a learning environment, whether they’re taking a test, sitting in a classroom, or doing their homework.
This culminated in the eventual development, in the mid-2000s, of the Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions (CVT) – a theoretical framework that explains how achievement emotions affect learning and academic performance.
And yet, he was soon to discover that he had only scratched the surface.
For many years, Reinhard Pekrun had conducted research with mathematics educators. These teachers had explained to him that confusion, which was not an achievement emotion, played a key role in mathematics classrooms.
“They talked to me about the importance of confusion in a situation where students are working on a complex maths problem, but they can’t seem to bring the pieces together to find a solution to the problem,” he says. “That’s not about success or failure – it’s about the struggle to resolve a cognitive disequilibrium that is triggered by contradiction.”
Though it is an unpleasant emotion, Professor Pekrun and his colleagues found that in some contexts, confusion – and the struggle that comes with it – can be beneficial for learning. As the saying goes, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.
“The finding that there can be a positive relationship between confusion and learning led me to the view that beyond achievement emotions, a whole range of other emotions – for example, epistemic emotions like confusion, surprise and curiosity – also played a role.”
Remarkably, these epistemic emotions – emotions that arise in a learning and teaching context in response to cognitive disequilibrium – had received little attention in the research literature.
“If you look at an emotion like intellectual curiosity, it’s the cornerstone of knowledge exploration and scientific enterprise, and the prime motive of Nobel Prize winners … just pure curiosity,” he says.
“Yet we couldn’t find a single longitudinal study on the role of intellectual curiosity in university students … so we knew next to nothing about how students could grow their curiosity, or if it is stifled by current conditions of teaching and learning in higher education institutions.”
In recent years, Reinhard Pekrun and his colleagues have seized the opportunity to fill these gaps in the literature.
As a result, Control-Value Theory has evolved from a framework that solely considers achievement emotions, to one that encompasses a wide range of human emotions – epistemic emotions, social emotions and even existential emotions – all of which are critically important for education.
The theory has revolutionised how we view emotions, and established Professor Pekrun as one of the world’s most influential scientists and educational researchers. It has been applied across the globe to harness student emotions in a productive way, enabling them to assess, understand, and change emotions to maximise learning opportunities.
It’s also been successful in underlining the importance of teacher emotions in a learning context, enabling educators to improve their interactions with students.
“In the past, educators across the different disciplines of education didn’t give much thought to teachers’ own emotions and display of emotions, and the effect that can have on the quality of teaching,” says Professor Pekrun, who is also a Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex in the UK, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Munich in Germany.
“We now know that growing your own interest and enthusiasm about a subject matter and about teaching itself is a prime mechanism for improving the classroom environment, and having a positive emotional influence on students.”
In other words, enthusiasm sparks enthusiasm – not only in classrooms, but also in workplaces and sporting teams. And this ‘emotional contagion’ (whether positive or negative) is reciprocal, going from educator to student (like when a weary teacher’s boredom infects the emotional state of their students), and from student to educator (like when a student’s enjoyment of a subject sparks enthusiasm in their teacher).
So, what’s next for CVT? How can the theory be enriched to better explain the links between emotions and academic achievement?
There are “so many avenues that need to be pursued and problems that need to be solved”, Professor Pekrun says.
In the long term, he hopes to formalise the theory, making it more precise and even better testable. This would allow researchers to mathematically model the links between the origin of a particular emotion, like the expectation of failing an exam, and the outcome of that emotion, such as anxiety that leads to poor performance, hopelessness and resignation.
His continued curiosity and enthusiasm are a reminder that human emotions are not mere accompaniments to learning and the pursuit of knowledge, they are a driving force behind it.
“There are so many questions we have yet to find answers for,” says Reinhard Pekrun, “and that makes this an endlessly fascinating area of research to be working in.”
Reinhard Pekrun is a Professorial Fellow at ACU’s Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, and a leading expert on achievement emotions. He pioneered research on emotions in achievement settings and originated the Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions. Professor Pekrun is one of the world’s most highly cited scientists and educational researchers.
Copyright@ Australian Catholic University 1998-2025 | ABN 15 050 192 660 CRICOS registered provider: 00004G | PRV12008