Teaching enthusiasm is far more than a feel-good buzzword. Researchers define it as a composite of teachers’ positive emotional experiences during instruction, their sense that teaching is intrinsically valuable, and their engagement and satisfaction at work. Decades of evidence link it to outcomes that matter: teachers who feel and display enthusiasm tend to foster greater enjoyment, motivation, and performance among their students, and recent work on classroom language shows that enthusiastic teachers literally speak differently, using more motivating instructional messages. Longitudinal studies even suggest an emotional transmission channel, in which teachers’ and students’ perceptions of enthusiastic teaching reinforce one another over time. Enthusiasm also travels with professional benefits, co-occurring with self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and occupational well-being.

Yet most research has focused on individual factors such as personality, emotion regulation, and efficacy beliefs. The organizational route, how school leadership shapes enthusiasm, has remained comparatively murky. Qian and Yan set out to illuminate that route using the Shanghai teacher sample from the 2024 Teaching and Learning International Survey, or TALIS, administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. After cleaning the original dataset of 4,078 teachers, they arrived at a final analytic sample of 1,303 teachers nested in 205 schools, with cluster sizes ranging from 2 to 10 teachers per school. Women made up 73.22 percent of the sample, 60.32 percent were aged 30 to 49, 77.36 percent held a bachelor’s degree, and 88.64 percent worked full time.

The theoretical engine of the study is control–value theory, developed by psychologist Reinhard Pekrun to explain students’ achievement emotions. The theory holds that emotions such as enjoyment and satisfaction arise from two subjective appraisals: control, the belief that one can successfully carry out an activity, and value, the perceived importance and meaning of that activity. Positive emotions flourish when both appraisals are favorable. The authors cautiously extended this logic from students to teachers, treating teaching self-efficacy, a teacher’s judgment of their ability to manage classrooms, explain concepts, and adapt instructional strategies, as the central control appraisal. Teacher collaboration, meanwhile, was framed as a value-related resource embedded in the school context, capable of reinforcing the professional meaning of teaching through knowledge sharing, joint lesson planning, peer feedback, and emotional support.

Shanghai offers an unusually rich setting for testing these ideas. Chinese schools have long institutionalized collaborative practice through teaching-research groups, collective lesson planning, and open classes in which colleagues observe and evaluate one another’s lessons. Unlike systems that prize individual teacher autonomy, instructional improvement in China is typically embedded in stable peer interaction. But the authors are careful to note that collaboration is not inherently beneficial; its effects depend on quality, trust, and the scope for professional autonomy. This nuance turned out to be central to the findings.

Methodologically, the study measured principal instructional leadership with four TALIS items covering instructional responsibility, responsibility for learning outcomes, monitoring of teacher performance, and provision of useful feedback, deliberately excluding items about vision and relational leadership. Teacher collaboration was captured with seven items on a frequency scale from never to once a week or more. Teaching self-efficacy drew on 16 items spanning classroom management and instructional strategies, and teaching enthusiasm used four items about enjoyment, happiness, enthusiasm, and satisfaction during teaching. All scales showed high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.862 to 0.958. The authors tested serial mediation using PROCESS Model 6 with 5,000 bootstrap samples, controlling for gender, age, education, and employment status, and then ran a two-level random-intercept model in Mplus as a robustness check.

The headline result is that principal instructional leadership was positively associated with teaching enthusiasm, with the strongest bivariate correlation in the dataset (r = 0.447). The total effect was 0.4215, of which the direct effect was 0.3162 and the total indirect effect was 0.1053, accounting for 24.99 percent of the total. But the decomposition of that indirect effect is where the study becomes genuinely revealing. The single largest pathway ran through teaching self-efficacy alone, explaining 17.82 percent of the total effect. The serial path, in which leadership fosters collaboration, which in turn strengthens self-efficacy, which then feeds enthusiasm, accounted for 3.99 percent. The collaboration-only path was the weakest at 3.17 percent, with a bootstrap 95 percent confidence interval of [0.0004, 0.0273], a lower bound so close to zero that the authors describe it as marginal and warrant cautious interpretation.

In other words, collaboration relates to enthusiasm primarily by building efficacy beliefs rather than through a direct emotional lift. The authors integrate control–value theory with Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory to explain this sequence: collaborative experiences supply peer modeling, verbal persuasion, joint problem solving, and mastery experiences, all established sources of efficacy beliefs, and it is the strengthened sense of instructional control that ultimately connects to positive emotions in the classroom. Routine meetings or material sharing that do not improve teachers’ actual work are unlikely to matter. Collaboration that provides usable feedback, transferable strategies, and professional recognition is what pays off. The multilevel robustness analysis, prompted by a school-level intraclass correlation of 0.068 for enthusiasm, confirmed the direction of the within-school effects, though the authors treat it as supplementary given the small cluster sizes.

The study also surfaced intriguing covariate patterns. Male teachers reported slightly higher enthusiasm than female teachers, younger teachers reported greater enthusiasm than older colleagues, possibly reflecting early-career idealism and lower occupational fatigue, and part-time teachers reported lower teaching self-efficacy, plausibly because they have fewer opportunities to join teaching-research groups and collective planning sessions where mastery experiences and peer support accumulate. The authors flag these explanations as tentative and as prompts for future research rather than established mechanisms.

The implications for school leadership are concrete. Because roughly 75 percent of the total effect remained direct, leadership clearly matters beyond the measured mediators, but the mediators that did emerge point to a clear priority: leaders should focus on the quality rather than the frequency of collaboration, ensuring that joint planning, peer observation, and feedback generate genuine mastery experiences. Targeted instructional support for part-time teachers and those with lower self-efficacy could be especially valuable. The authors caution that the data are cross-sectional and cannot establish causation, that complete-case screening reduced the sample, that some fit indices were mixed, and that Shanghai’s comparatively developed, highly institutionalized educational context means the findings should not be generalized to China as a whole. Still, by extending control–value theory from students’ achievement emotions to teachers’ occupational emotions, the study opens a promising window onto how school organizations can cultivate one of teaching’s most contagious resources.

Subject of Research: The relationship between principal instructional leadership and teaching enthusiasm among Shanghai teachers, mediated by teacher collaboration and teaching self-efficacy within control–value theory

Article Title: Principal instructional leadership and teaching enthusiasm among teachers in Shanghai: mediating mechanisms within a control–value theory framework

Article References: Qian, M., & Yan, C. (2026). Principal instructional leadership and teaching enthusiasm among teachers in Shanghai: mediating mechanisms within a control–value theory framework. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1460. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10004-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10004-z

Keywords: principal instructional leadership, teaching enthusiasm, teacher collaboration, teaching self-efficacy, control–value theory, TALIS 2024, Shanghai, teacher emotions, school leadership, educational psychology, serial mediation, Current Psychology

The study is grounded in Control-Value Theory, a influential framework developed by psychologist Reinhard Pekrun that explains how achievement emotions arise from two fundamental appraisals. The first is control, a student’s perception of how well they can master a task, which depends on their confidence and their expectations of success or failure. The second is value, the subjective importance a student attaches to the activity and its outcomes. When perceived control is low and the activity is seen as important, students tend to experience anxiety and confusion. When control is high but the activity seems pointless, boredom tends to take over. The theory predicts that these appraisals are themselves shaped by individual characteristics, the home environment, and the classroom and school context, which is precisely the chain the researchers set out to test on an international scale.

The team focused on fifth-grade students, drawing on nationally representative samples from the three countries. Rather than treating emotions as continuous scores, the researchers used binary logistic regression models, a statistical approach that estimates the odds of a student falling into a high-negative-emotion group versus a lower one. Crucially, the analysis incorporated TIMSS sampling weights and jackknife repeated replication procedures, standard techniques in international large-scale assessment research that account for the complex sampling designs of these surveys and produce more accurate standard errors. The predictor variables included instructional clarity, meaning how clearly teachers explain lessons; digital self-efficacy, or students’ confidence in using technology for learning; sense of school belonging; home resources for learning, such as books and educational materials; and school emphasis on academic success. The researchers also tested exploratory interaction terms informed by the Control-Value framework, allowing them to examine whether the effect of one factor depended on the level of another.

The results reveal a striking pattern of both universality and cultural specificity. Some predictors operated similarly across all three countries, suggesting that certain psychological mechanisms transcend national boundaries. Others varied considerably depending on the educational context, underscoring that the emotional experience of learning mathematics is not produced by classroom factors alone but by the interplay between those factors and the surrounding sociocultural and systemic environment. This dual finding is perhaps the study’s most important contribution: it validates the core predictions of Control-Value Theory while cautioning against one-size-fits-all interpretations of how students’ emotions develop.

One of the most consistent findings concerned digital self-efficacy. Across the countries examined, students who felt confident in their ability to use digital tools for learning were frequently associated with lower levels of negative emotions in mathematics. This connection makes sense within the Control-Value framework: confidence in one’s capabilities, whether in handling technology or tackling mathematical content, feeds directly into the sense of control that the theory identifies as a cornerstone of positive emotional experience. In an era when digital learning tools have become embedded in mathematics instruction worldwide, the finding suggests that a student’s relationship with technology may quietly shape their emotional relationship with the subject itself.

Instructional clarity emerged as another powerful predictor, though with notable geographic variation. The association between clear teaching and reduced confusion was particularly strong in South Africa and Türkiye. Confusion, in the language of achievement emotions research, is not merely a momentary state of puzzlement; when persistent and unresolved, it can undermine engagement and push students toward avoidance. The finding implies that when teachers explain mathematical concepts in ways students can follow, they are doing more than transmitting content. They are actively managing the emotional climate of the classroom, reducing the uncertainty that breeds confusion and, by extension, the disengagement that often follows it.

The interaction effects uncovered in the study add a further layer of sophistication. Several significant interactions indicated that the relationship between contextual factors and students’ emotions was not fixed but contingent on other conditions. In practical terms, this means that a factor such as home resources for learning might matter more in one country or for one group of students than in another, or that the protective effect of school belonging could be amplified or diminished by other aspects of the environment. Such findings align with the Control-Value Theory’s insistence that emotions emerge from a dynamic system of appraisals embedded in social settings, rather than from any single variable acting in isolation.

For educators and policymakers, the implications are concrete. The authors point to the value of designing instructional environments that support students’ perceived control over mathematics learning, since environments associated with stronger feelings of control are also associated with lower levels of negative achievement emotions. That could mean clearer explanations, structured opportunities for students to experience competence, and attention to how confidently students can navigate the digital tools increasingly used in lessons. It could also mean recognizing that interventions must be tailored to context: a strategy that reduces boredom in Oslo may not translate directly to Johannesburg or Istanbul without adaptation to local conditions, resources, and cultural expectations around schooling.

The study also carries a broader message about how the education community measures success. International assessments such as TIMSS have traditionally emphasized achievement scores, but this research demonstrates that the emotional experiences accompanying those scores are themselves patterned, predictable, and consequential. Boredom and confusion are not background noise; they are signals of how students appraise their control over learning and the value they attach to it, and they influence engagement, persistence, and ultimately academic outcomes. By modeling these emotions with rigorous statistical methods across three countries, the researchers have helped move achievement emotions from the periphery of educational research toward its center.

The work, conducted by Umut Birkan Özkan, Yeşim Ozansak Topcu, and Buket Karadağ, was published as an open-access article in BMC Psychology on 25 September 2026, allowing researchers, teachers, and policymakers anywhere to examine the full analysis. As mathematics education systems worldwide grapple with persistent gaps in performance and engagement, the study offers a reminder that the path to better outcomes may run through the emotional lives of students as much as through curricula and tests. Understanding why a child feels bored or confused in a mathematics lesson, and which levers in the classroom, the home, and the school can shift those feelings, may prove to be one of the most practical questions education research can ask.

Subject of Research: Cross-national predictors of negative achievement emotions in mathematics among fifth-grade students based on Control-Value Theory

Article Title: Predictors of students’ negative achievement emotions in mathematics: a cross-national analysis based on Control-Value Theory

Article References: Özkan, U. B., Ozansak Topcu, Y., & Karadağ, B. (2026). Predictors of students’ negative achievement emotions in mathematics: a cross-national analysis based on Control-Value Theory. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05669-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05669-x

Keywords: Control-Value Theory, achievement emotions, mathematics education, TIMSS 2023, boredom, confusion, digital self-efficacy, instructional clarity, school belonging, cross-national comparison, logistic regression, educational psychology

The research, published in Current Psychology by Jun Zhang of Soochow University and Sehan University and Shungui Xiang of the Tourism College of Zhejiang, followed 1,318 university students across three universities in Shaanxi and Zhejiang provinces. Rather than taking a single snapshot, the team conducted a three-wave longitudinal survey, measuring academic emotions, learning motivation, time management monitoring, social self-efficacy, and learning satisfaction at separate points in time. This design allowed the researchers to examine how psychological states at one stage relate to outcomes at later stages, offering a far stronger basis for inferring directional pathways than a one-off questionnaire could provide.

The instruments were established scales in Chinese educational psychology. Students completed the Academic Emotions Questionnaire developed by Xu and Gong, which captures the emotions experienced in academic settings; the Learning Motivation Questionnaire for college students by Tian and Pan; Zhang’s Self-Monitoring Scale for Time Management; a social self-efficacy measure in the tradition of Smith and Betz; and a learning satisfaction scale assessing students’ contentment with their self-learning and personal growth. The theoretical backdrop draws heavily on Reinhard Pekrun’s control-value theory of achievement emotions, which holds that emotions in learning arise from students’ perceived control over outcomes and the value they assign to academic activities, and on Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, which frames self-efficacy beliefs as engines of human motivation and action.

The headline finding is a striking null result with major implications: academic emotions did not directly predict learning satisfaction. In other words, feeling good about coursework does not, by itself, make students satisfied with their learning, and feeling bad does not automatically breed dissatisfaction. Instead, the statistical models revealed that emotions exert their influence indirectly, through independent or multiple mediation pathways involving learning motivation, time management monitoring, and social self-efficacy. Emotions, in this account, are not the endpoint but the ignition—resources that must be converted into other psychological assets before they can shape how students evaluate their educational experience.

Consider what each mediator represents. Learning motivation, grounded in frameworks from self-determination theory to expectancy-value models, reflects the energy and direction students bring to their studies. Time management monitoring, a component of self-regulated learning in Zimmerman’s influential account, captures the degree to which students observe and adjust how they allocate their study hours. Social self-efficacy denotes confidence in one’s ability to initiate and maintain social interactions, a resource that matters enormously in collaborative classrooms, group projects, and campus life more broadly. The study’s mediation analysis suggests that emotions feed into all three of these internal resources, and that these resources, in turn, drive satisfaction.

Zhang and Xiang label the resulting pattern the Multi-Path Psychological Resource Conversion Model. The core idea is that academic emotions activate students’ internal learning resources—motivational, regulatory, and social—and it is this activation, rather than the emotional state itself, that ultimately determines learning satisfaction. Positive emotions such as enjoyment and hope may energize motivation and make students more willing to monitor their time and reach out socially; negative emotions such as anxiety, boredom, and frustration may deplete those same resources. Either way, the emotional signal must pass through the machinery of motivation, self-regulation, and social confidence before it registers in a student’s overall judgment of their learning.

The technical strength of the study lies in its longitudinal, multi-wave structure and its use of mediation modeling, which distinguishes direct from indirect effects. By measuring the variables at three separate time points, the researchers reduced the risk that their results simply reflect momentary mood contaminating every answer on a single questionnaire. The large sample of over 1,300 students, drawn from universities in two different provinces, adds statistical power and some geographic breadth, although the findings still come from a specific cultural and institutional context and should be generalized with care.

The practical implications are where the study becomes genuinely provocative. If emotions only influence satisfaction through intermediate resources, then interventions aimed solely at improving students’ emotional states—wellness weeks, mood-boosting campaigns, stress-relief activities—may be insufficient on their own. The authors argue that educational practice should expand its focus from merely improving emotional states to systematically enhancing learning motivation, self-regulation abilities such as time management monitoring, and social self-efficacy. A student who feels anxious but possesses strong motivational drive, disciplined study routines, and confidence in social settings may still report high learning satisfaction, whereas a cheerful student lacking those resources may not.

This reframing also connects to a broader research landscape. Prior work has linked academic emotions to achievement and burnout, tied time management to academic self-efficacy and procrastination, and shown that self-efficacy beliefs mediate relationships between personality, adjustment, and academic outcomes. Studies of online learning have emphasized satisfaction as a key outcome shaped by motivation and platform design, while longitudinal research on procrastination and study satisfaction has documented how self-regulatory struggles erode students’ contentment over time. The new study synthesizes these strands into a single multi-path model, positioning emotions as upstream inputs to a resource-conversion process rather than as direct causes of satisfaction.

For educators, the message is a call to build the machinery of conversion. Classrooms that cultivate autonomous motivation, teach explicit time-monitoring strategies, and create low-stakes opportunities for students to build social confidence may do more for learning satisfaction than any single effort to lift classroom mood. For students, the takeaway is equally concrete: your feelings about a course matter, but what determines whether you end up satisfied is what those feelings become—whether they are converted into drive, discipline, and the courage to connect. The study, published as volume 45, article 1515 of Current Psychology, was supported by a grant from the 2026 Soft Science Research Program of Zhejiang Province, and its datasets are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Subject of Research: The indirect mechanisms linking academic emotions to learning satisfaction among university students

Article Title: The impact of academic emotions on learning satisfaction: the mediating roles of learning motivation, time management monitoring, and social self-efficacy

Article References: Zhang, J., & Xiang, S. (2026). The impact of academic emotions on learning satisfaction: the mediating roles of learning motivation, time management monitoring, and social self-efficacy. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1515. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10058-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10058-z

Keywords: academic emotions, learning satisfaction, learning motivation, time management monitoring, social self-efficacy, mediation analysis, longitudinal study, educational psychology, self-regulated learning, control-value theory, university students, China

The research, led by Xia Zheng of Nanchang University together with colleagues from institutions across China and Spain, focused on the Chinese Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Mathematics, abbreviated CAEQ-M. Unlike many psychological instruments that are translated directly from English originals, this questionnaire was built from the ground up using open-ended descriptions of classroom emotions written by Taiwanese students. That approach allowed the instrument to capture four emotions the researchers identified as culturally salient in Chinese mathematics classrooms: enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom. The questionnaire draws on the broader framework of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire, which itself rests on the Control-Value Theory of achievement emotions, the influential account developed by Reinhard Pekrun that links students’ emotional experiences to their sense of control over outcomes and the value they place on academic activities.

What made the new study distinctive was its combination of two features that are rarely tested together: a longitudinal design spanning an entire school year and a modern statistical approach known as exploratory structural equation modeling, or ESEM. The researchers recruited 377 third- and fourth-grade students from two elementary schools in Mainland China and surveyed them at four separate waves across one academic year. Because achievement emotions are thought to fluctuate with classroom experiences, the team wanted to know not just whether the questionnaire worked at a single moment, but whether it measured the same constructs in the same way across repeated occasions, a property psychometricians call longitudinal measurement invariance.

The statistical heart of the study lay in a head-to-head comparison between confirmatory factor analysis, the traditional workhorse of questionnaire validation, and exploratory structural equation modeling with target rotation, known as ESEM-T. The difference between the two approaches may sound technical, but it has profound consequences. Confirmatory factor analysis forces each survey item to load on only one emotion factor, treating any relationship between an item and other emotions as statistical noise to be discarded. ESEM-T, by contrast, permits small cross-loadings, acknowledging that a single statement about math class might tap more than one emotion at once. Human emotions are messy, the argument goes, and measurement models should reflect that messiness rather than deny it.

The results were unambiguous. At every one of the four waves and on every fit index examined, the ESEM-T model fit the data better than the oblique four-factor confirmatory model. More striking still was what happened when cross-loadings were forced to zero. Under the confirmatory model, the latent correlation between anger and boredom ballooned to between 0.88 and 0.95 across the waves, figures so high that the two emotions would appear nearly indistinguishable, almost redundant. Under ESEM-T, the same correlation dropped to a more interpretable range of 0.73 to 0.80. In other words, the apparent overlap between anger and boredom was largely an artifact of the restrictive modeling strategy, not a genuine feature of children’s emotional lives. For anyone who has ever used confirmatory factor analysis to validate an emotions questionnaire, the implication is sobering: the standard method may systematically exaggerate the similarity of negative emotions.

Even with the more flexible model, however, anger and boredom remained the least well differentiated pair of emotions throughout the study, and the anger scale proved to be the weakest of the four subscales. The authors conclude that the measurement of anger in this instrument would benefit from revision, a candid admission that is relatively rare in validation studies, which more often emphasize what works rather than what does not. For researchers planning to use the CAEQ-M, the practical message is clear: the enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom scales can be used with confidence, while anger scores should be interpreted with caution until the scale is refined.

The invariance testing provided the study’s second major contribution. Across the four waves, the researchers found that the four-factor model held with invariant thresholds, loadings, and intercepts, meaning that children interpreted the questionnaire items in the same way in autumn as they did at the end of the school year. The same invariance held across gender at each wave, indicating that boys and girls responded to the instrument equivalently. This is a critical foundation for any longitudinal claim, because without invariance, apparent changes in scores over time could simply reflect changes in how the instrument functions rather than genuine changes in children’s emotions. With invariance established, the researchers could legitimately ask whether emotional experiences shifted across the year.

They had, and the answer was both simple and troubling. Repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that only one of the four emotions changed significantly across the four occasions: boredom. And it did not change in a promising direction. Boredom rose steadily across the school year, with a particularly pronounced elevation at the fourth and final measurement point. Enjoyment, anxiety, and anger, by contrast, remained statistically stable. The finding resonates with a growing international literature suggesting that boredom is among the most corrosive of achievement emotions, associated with reduced attention, shallower learning strategies, lower motivation, and poorer grades. If boredom accumulates as the academic year progresses, classrooms may be quietly losing children’s engagement long before final examinations arrive.

Why might boredom climb? The study itself does not test explanations, but the pattern invites several hypotheses consistent with Control-Value Theory. Boredom arises when students perceive an activity as lacking value or when their sense of control is undermined by tasks that are either too repetitive or mismatched to their skill level. A mathematics curriculum that becomes more demanding or more monotonous in the later months of the school year could plausibly push more children into this emotional state. Alternatively, the cumulative fatigue of a long academic year, with its cycle of drills, homework, and assessments, may erode the novelty and perceived meaningfulness of math lessons. Distinguishing among these possibilities will require future studies that pair emotion measurements with detailed records of classroom activities and instructional practices.

The study’s strengths lie in its design: four measurement occasions, a sample of young children who are often overlooked in emotion research, a culturally grounded instrument, and a modeling approach that many psychometricians argue should become the default for multi-item emotion scales. Its limitations are those of any single-region study; the participants came from two elementary schools in Mainland China, and generalization to other regions, age groups, and subjects remains to be demonstrated. Still, the implications reach well beyond psychometrics. For educators, the steady rise of boredom across the year is a signal worth heeding, a reminder that emotional engagement is not a fixed trait but a resource that can be depleted. For researchers, the work is a methodological wake-up call, demonstrating that the choice between confirmatory and exploratory modeling is not a technical footnote but a decision that can reshape what we believe about the emotional lives of students. As mathematics classrooms around the world grapple with declining engagement, knowing how to measure the emotions involved, accurately and over time, is an essential first step toward addressing them.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal psychometric validation of a mathematics achievement emotions questionnaire in Chinese elementary school children

Article Title: Longitudinal validation of the Chinese Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Mathematics: A one-year study using exploratory structural equation modeling

Article References: Zheng, X., Chen, J., Fu, Q.-L., Wang, H., Zhou, Y., Liao, X.-L., Chen, N., Chen, I.-H., & Malas, O. (2026). Longitudinal validation of the Chinese Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Mathematics: A one-year study using exploratory structural equation modeling. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05706-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05706-9

Keywords: achievement emotions, mathematics education, psychometrics, exploratory structural equation modeling, measurement invariance, boredom, anxiety, elementary students, Control-Value Theory, questionnaire validation, longitudinal study, educational psychology

The study, led by Seçil Beyece İncazlı together with Ayça Fidan and Sevda Tüzün Özdemir, set out to answer a question that has puzzled educational psychologists for years: why do students who put off academic work so often end up glued to social media? The connection between the two behaviors has been documented repeatedly across countries and cultures, from Lebanon to Peru to Pakistan, but the emotional machinery linking them has remained murky. The Turkish team proposed that two emotional processes—boredom and alexithymia—might act as hidden bridges between the two behaviors.

Alexithymia, a term coined in the 1970s, describes a trait in which people struggle to identify, understand, and describe their own emotions. It is not a psychiatric disorder but a stable personality characteristic, typically measured with the twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the instrument used in this study. People high in alexithymia often feel vague inner states they cannot label, and previous research has linked the trait to problematic use of mobile phones, internet novels, and social networks—platforms that offer constant, low-effort stimulation when one’s own emotional world feels illegible.

Boredom, meanwhile, has undergone something of a scientific rehabilitation in the past decade. Researchers such as James Danckert and John Eastwood have reframed it not as a trivial state but as a signal: the uncomfortable awareness that one’s attention is unengaged and that the current activity holds no meaning. In academic settings, boredom is one of the most thoroughly studied achievement emotions. Reinhard Pekrun’s Control–Value Theory, which guided the new study, holds that emotions like boredom arise when students feel neither in control of their learning nor invested in its value—and that these emotions then shape how they behave, often driving them away from the task at hand.

To test whether these two emotional states connect procrastination to social media addiction, the researchers recruited 174 Turkish university students and asked them to complete an online survey measuring all four constructs: academic procrastination, boredom, alexithymia, and social media addiction, using validated Turkish-language versions of established scales. They then analyzed the data with a serial mediation model, a statistical technique that tests whether the effect of one variable on another travels through a chain of intermediate variables rather than a single shortcut. Specifically, they examined whether procrastination leads to boredom, which leads to alexithymia, which finally feeds social media addiction.

The results were striking in their clarity on one point and their nuance on another. Academic procrastination was positively associated with social media addiction, with a regression coefficient of 0.45, highly significant statistically, and the overall model accounted for 38 percent of the variance in social media addiction—a substantial share for research on human behavior. Boredom emerged as the star of the show: it significantly mediated the link between procrastination and social media addiction on its own, with an indirect effect whose confidence interval excluded zero. In plain terms, students who procrastinated reported more boredom, and that boredom was associated with more addictive social media use.

Alexithymia told a subtler story. On its own, it did not act as an independent mediator between procrastination and social media addiction. But when the researchers tested the full serial pathway—procrastination first breeding boredom, boredom then feeding into difficulty identifying feelings, and that emotional confusion finally spilling into compulsive platform use—the chain was statistically significant, though modest in size, with an indirect effect of 0.01 and a confidence interval of 0.00 to 0.04. The finding suggests that alexithymia is not the main highway between procrastination and scrolling, but it may function as a secondary on-ramp: once boredom has taken hold, students who cannot name what they are feeling may be particularly prone to seeking relief in the endless feed.

The theoretical implications reach back to Pekrun’s framework. Control–Value Theory predicts that when students perceive low control and low value in their studies, negative activating and deactivating emotions follow, and boredom is the classic deactivating emotion—one that drains motivation and encourages escape. The new findings fit this picture neatly: procrastination appears to generate an emotional vacuum, and social media, with its algorithmically optimized novelty, rushes in to fill it. Previous work has shown that boredom proneness predicts internet addiction through attentional bias toward social networks, and that boredom drives people to use social media specifically to pass time and escape unpleasant states. The Turkish study adds a serial dimension, showing that the emotional aftermath of avoidance can cascade into further difficulties with emotional awareness itself.

There are, of course, important caveats. The study is cross-sectional: all data were collected at a single point in time from a self-selected sample of 174 students, which means the direction of causality cannot be firmly established. It is entirely plausible that social media addiction also fuels procrastination and boredom, creating a feedback loop rather than a one-way street. Self-report questionnaires are vulnerable to common method bias, and the sample, drawn from a single country, may not generalize universally. The authors themselves note that no preregistration exists for the study and that data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. These limitations do not erase the findings, but they counsel against reading the mediation model as a proven causal mechanism.

Even so, the practical implications are tantalizing. If boredom is the more robust bridge between procrastination and problematic scrolling, then interventions that make academic tasks more engaging—or that teach students to tolerate and work through boredom rather than flee it—could break the cycle. The authors suggest that addressing academic boredom and supporting emotional awareness may be promising avenues for future research and practice. In an era when the average student’s attention is contested by platforms engineered to exploit every idle moment, understanding that the escape begins with an emotion rather than a decision may be the first step toward helping students reclaim both their time and their inner lives.

Subject of Research: The role of boredom and alexithymia in linking academic procrastination to social media addiction among university students

Article Title: Emotional processes in the association between academic procrastination and social media addiction: a serial mediation model of boredom and alexithymia

Article References: İncazlı, S. B., Fidan, A., & Özdemir, S. T. (2026). Emotional processes in the association between academic procrastination and social media addiction: a serial mediation model of boredom and alexithymia. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1558. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10116-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10116-6

Keywords: academic procrastination, social media addiction, boredom, alexithymia, serial mediation, university students, Control-Value Theory, educational psychology, emotion regulation, cyberpsychology, achievement emotions, Current Psychology

Knowledge Building is an educational approach, pioneered within the field of computer-supported collaborative learning, in which classrooms operate as knowledge-creating communities. Rather than receiving information passively, students identify questions that matter to them, propose ideas, refine those ideas through discussion, and take collective responsibility for advancing the community’s understanding. In practice, this work is often supported by Knowledge Forum, an online platform where learners post notes, build on each other’s contributions, and connect fragments of ideas into progressively deeper explanations. Teachers design scaffolds — tools, prompts, and strategies — and gradually hand over epistemic agency to the students themselves.

Implementing Knowledge Building is not without friction. Prior studies have documented resistance among novice students, particularly those accustomed to individual, teacher-directed learning, and early confusion is a common response when learners confront unfamiliar pedagogy and complex subject matter. This is where emotions enter the picture. The study draws on control-value theory, which holds that students experience epistemic emotions — curiosity, enjoyment, surprise, confusion, frustration, anxiety, and boredom — when they confront needs or challenges tied to knowledge itself, such as detecting a misconception, weighing conflicting evidence, or coordinating competing viewpoints. Positive epistemic emotions have generally been linked to engagement, self-regulated learning, and achievement, while negative emotions tend to undermine them.

To investigate whether reflective assessment could shape these emotions and, in turn, the quality of collaborative discourse, the researchers conducted a quasi-experimental study with 113 undergraduates enrolled in an educational research course over sixteen weeks in a blended format. Students had no prior experience with Knowledge Building pedagogy or its technology. Two intact classes were compared: a control group of 61 students and an experimental group of 52. Both groups were taught by the same instructor, followed the same syllabus, used identical materials and the same Knowledge Forum environment, and attended equivalent sessions — a design that strengthens the ecological validity of the comparison.

The course unfolded through structured modules. Both groups learned the principles of Knowledge Building and the platform, identified significant questions related to action research, and cycled through phases of question decomposition, online inquiry, and pooling of findings in mini-conference-style presentations. Only the experimental group, however, completed a module of concurrent reflective assessment. In these sessions, students received a nominal report with visual analytics drawn from a prototype analytical dashboard, showing their individual and community progress against two key Knowledge Building principles: moving from egocentric contributions toward collective cognitive responsibility, and recognizing that all ideas are improvable. They then completed portfolio templates combining Likert-scale items and open self-assessment questions, asking themselves, in effect, how they were doing and how they could do better.

Emotional data came from a validated short form of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, administered at weeks 6, 11, and 16, capturing self-reported surprise, enjoyment, curiosity, confusion, frustration, anxiety, and boredom. Discourse quality was assessed from 1,174 notes written on Knowledge Forum, each coded on four dimensions — questioning, theorizing, scientific sophistication, and use of authoritative sources — with two independent analysts reaching 93.79 percent inter-rater agreement. A composite quality-of-contributions score was computed for each student by averaging the four dimension means.

The correlational and structural equation modeling results were striking. Positive epistemic emotions correlated positively with contribution quality (r = 0.674), negative emotions correlated negatively (r = −0.637), and the two emotion clusters were themselves strongly inversely related (r = −0.748). In the structural model, positive emotions showed a significant positive effect on discourse quality (β = 0.49) while negative emotions exerted a significant negative effect (β = −0.26). Notably, positive emotions were the stronger predictor, suggesting that cultivating curiosity and enjoyment may matter more than merely suppressing frustration when the goal is richer collective knowledge work.

The comparative analyses revealed the catalytic role of reflection. Both groups improved over time, but the experimental group improved earlier and more consistently, with large effect sizes across all three outcome variables (for example, 0.439 for positive emotions and 0.207 for contribution quality), and significant differences in every pairwise time comparison. The control group showed significant gains only from the third measurement point onward. Between-group comparisons confirmed that the groups started equivalent, diverged significantly at weeks 11 and 16, and then converged toward the end of the course — a pattern the authors interpret as evidence that reflective assessment accelerates students’ adaptation to Knowledge Building, rather than producing permanently superior outcomes. Once both groups internalized the collaborative and self-regulatory routines, the gap naturally closed.

For educators, the practical implications are concrete. The authors recommend that instructors implementing Knowledge Building with novices schedule reflective sessions concurrently with inquiry, using analytics-based reports to help students see how their discourse is evolving and to identify concrete improvements — seeking better sources, asking for help, or engaging experts. The findings also suggest reflection can help neutralize negative emotions such as confusion by restoring students’ sense of control. The study’s authors caution that the sample was predominantly female, that prior academic achievement was not controlled, and that self-reported emotion measures may carry response biases, and they call for replication across contexts and educational stages, including secondary education where adolescents’ still-developing self-regulation may make reflective scaffolds even more crucial. Future work, they note, could embed emotion-expression tools directly into Knowledge Forum to capture emotional dynamics in real time.

Subject of Research: The effect of reflective assessment on epistemic emotions and discourse quality in Knowledge Building classrooms

Article Title: Reflective assessment in knowledge building classrooms: fostering positive epistemic emotions and quality discourse on educational research

Article References: Gutiérrez-Braojos, C., Zhu, G., Rodríguez-Domínguez, C., & Rodríguez-Chirino, P. (2026). Reflective assessment in knowledge building classrooms: fostering positive epistemic emotions and quality discourse on educational research. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00061-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00061-4

Keywords: Knowledge Building, reflective assessment, epistemic emotions, collaborative learning, Knowledge Forum, control-value theory, computer-supported collaborative learning, quality of discourse, higher education, educational research, Reflective, assessment