On-line assessment of pride and shame: Relationships with cognitive dimensions in university students

We investigated some psychometric properties of an instrument developed to evaluate achievement emotions, focusing on pride and shame, with an on-line assessment. These emotions, as two moral emotions partially neglected by the literature, can also be categorized as achievement emotions, because of their salience within everyday academic life. The participants were 83 Italian university students. During their first year of university, we measured text comprehension; during their third year, we measured pride and shame (with the on-line version of the Brief-Achievement Emotions Questionnaire) and academic performance. Path analyses indicated the partial mediating role of the two emotions between text comprehension and academic performance, differing in study and test settings. A repeated-measure analysis of variance revealed higher levels of pride compared to shame, and of emotions associated with the evaluative setting. Such findings support the relevance of assessing emotions related to learning, for example monitoring them continuously through technological instruments.