Assessing primary students’ emotions: The Drawing Set for the Achievement Emotions Adjective List

We explored the goodness of a Drawing Set for assessing primary students’ achievement emotions, to be matched with a short form of the Achievement Emotions Adjective List (DS-AEAL). Control-value theory was the main theoretical framework. First, we developed a set of 10 drawings of faces about enjoyment, pride, hope, relief, relaxation, anxiety, anger, shame, sadness, and boredom. We involved 259 adults as raters (Study 1). Second, we proposed two ad-hoc tasks (a matching task and a labelling task) to 89 adults (Study 2). The results confirmed the good correspondence between the DS-AEAL drawings and the verbal labels. Third, we administered the same tasks to 192 second and fifth-graders (Study 3). We found class-level differences, with lower performance for second-graders, in line with their less-developed capacities to master recognition and recall tasks. On the whole, performance at the tasks was better for primary rather than secondary emotions. The study suffers from limitations related, for example, to the reduced sample size and to cultural differences in gestures used to express emotions. However, these findings support the goodness of the DS-AEAL to assess achievement emotions in a variety of learning contexts, together with the corresponding verbal labels. This research can be a preliminary step to develop an instrument combining the advantages of using verbal and nonverbal stimuli to measure achievement emotions. It can respond both to research and educational purposes, primarily in academic contexts such as schools, where reliable, valid, and easy-to-administer methods are a key resource.