Emotionality, Emotion Regulation, and School Performance in Middle School Children
Section snippets
Participants
The 103 middle school (6th to 8th grade) young adolescents who participated in this study (51 girls and 52 boys) attended one of two Jewish affiliated day schools in a major Northeastern city. This particular age group (11–14 years, M=12.1 years) was selected because the emergence of formal operational reasoning in children of this age has been linked with an increasingly abstract ability to understand and reflect on previous affective experiences (Piaget, 1981). More specifically, the
Negative academic affect scale
The Negative Academic Affect Scale (NAAS) (Gumora, 1993) was developed to assess students' perceptions of the frequency of negative affect that they experience while engaged in school-related tasks. The 39-item NAAS was created to measure the degree of anxiety, frustration, and anger that students feel while engaged in a variety of academic tasks ranging from homework, to class participation, to engagement in class projects. Some questions focus on students' abilities to organize and synthesize
RESULTS
Preliminary analyses revealed that there was no pattern of significant differences in the study variables as a function of either gender or grade level (only 1 of 16 analyses was significant). There were also no pattern of significant differences in the magnitude of any of the correlations among the measures (using Fisher Z tests) as a function of students' gender, grade level, or the school they attended. Consequently, correlations among the study measures (see Table 1) are shown for the
DISCUSSION
This study provides additional support for the role of socio-emotional factors in students' school performance Birch & Ladd, 1997, Pianta et al., 1995, Wentzel, 1996, Wentzel, 1999, while also clarifying some of the uniquely affective contributors (rather than relationships or goals) to that performance. More specifically, the present results indicate that both middle school children's emotional dispositions and their academically related affect are connected with their school success. Even
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a dissertation by Gail Gumora submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the doctoral degree at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University. We would especially like to thank the children and teachers who made this research possible. A version of this paper was presented at the 2001 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Minneapolis, MN.
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