Educational environments are inherently full of emotions that students and teachers being the essential agents of education, experience frequently.  Except for anxiety research (Zeidner, 2007), students experience different emotions, including anger, boredom, shame, hope, hopelessness, enjoyment, pride, relief, frustration, etc., during their academic lives. Herein, the ubiquitous nature of emotions requires utilizing several methods to promote positive emotional states while lessening the degree of negative ones to foster appropriate learning outcomes (Frenzel & Stephens, 2013). In this regard, emotion-regulation having its origin in psychoanalytic, stress, and coping tradition (Gross, 1999), arose as an essential construct.

According to Gross and John (2003), there are two main strategies to regulate one’s emotions: antecedent-focused (reappraisal) and response-focused (suppression). While the former method points out the things done before the arousal of the emotions and influences behavior changes, the latter strategy is utilized after the arousal of emotions to monitor people’s response tendencies. Reappraisers tend to express their emotional states by elaborating the reasons for experienced emotions; however, suppressors prefer masking their inner states. Reappraisers generally experience and express more positive and less negative emotions, are willing to share their emotional states with others, have close relationships with their friends, and have high self-esteem, life satisfaction, and low levels of depressive symptoms. On the other hand, suppressors generally experience and express less positive more negative emotions, are unwilling to share their emotions, do not have close relationships with others, and finally have low self-esteem, life satisfaction, and a comparably high level of depressive symptoms (Gross & John, 2003). However, Gross and John’s (2003) model seems a bit limited to thoroughly explaining the emotion-regulation process in achievement situations. Therefore, an integrated model was developed to articulate how emotions arise and are regulated in different achievement situations by considering time, object focus, and various emotions by integrating Gross’s (2015) process model of emotion-regulation and Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions (Harley et al.2019).

In this integrated model, a four-phase model, including situation, attention, appraisal, and response, attempts to explain how achievement emotions are generated. Accordingly, an achievement situation might result in appraisals as one’s assessment of the situation in which people might give emotional responses based on their appraisals. At the same time, their responses may also change the situation, their appraisals, and attention. In this process, emotion-regulation strategies, divided into five families, play critical roles by getting involved differently in the emotion-generative process. These are situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. These strategies provide an opportunity in removing the complexities and making elaborations in the emotion-regulation era by specifically including achievement situations compared to the previous research (Harley et al., 2019).

Building on the current literature, using emotion-regulation strategies is essential for people’s well-being, mental health, and academic success (Lee et al., 2016). Therefore, students should undertake different strategies to cope with their emotions in achievement situations, which is also essential for fostering the learning outcomes in many disciplines. In this regard, there is a need for a valid and reliable measure to assess how students regulate their emotions in different achievement contexts. The current measures (e.g., Gross & John, 2003) and their adaptations, unfortunately, focus on the most common dimensions (i.e., suppression and reappraisal) that might limit the views of emotion-regulation in achievement situations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to adapt the Academic Emotions Regulation Questionnaire (AERQ) to the Turkish language and provide evidence about its psychometric characteristics. Through this research, there would be an opportunity to make sound arguments on how emotions are generated and regulated in achievement situations by considering eight dimensional-structure of AERQ.

Two different samples of middle school students in Turkey participated in this study. Cluster sampling, as a probabilistic sampling strategy, was utilized in both Study 1 and Study 2. Accordingly, 490 middle school students from three randomly selected schools participated in Study 1. Among the participants, 318 were 7th graders (64.9%), while 172 were 8th graders (35.1%). Besides, 241 students were female students (49.2%), and 243 were male students (49.6%). On the other hand, 5371 students from 53 randomly selected middle schools took part in Study 2. Of the participants, 2955 students (55%) were from the 7th grades, while 2405 of them (44.8%) were from the 8th grades. Female students (n=2830) constituted 52.7%, while male students (n=2494) formed 46.4% of the sample. The Academic Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (AERQ) was developed by Buric, Soric, and Penezic (2016) to measure students’ emotion-regulation strategies used in different learning environments. AERQ, as a multidimensional self-report instrument, has both Croatian and English versions and includes 37 items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly Disagree” (1) to “Strongly Agree” (5). The instrument was administered to 1030 high-school students in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the development process. The original scale displays an eight-dimensional structure with the following modification indices: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) =.04, Standard Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) =.05. The dimensions are situation selection (4 items, α= .81), developing competences (5 items, α= .69), redirecting attention (6 items, α= .85), reappraisal (5 items, α= .73), suppression (5 items, α= .63), respiration (3 items, α= .79), venting (5 items, α= .80), and seeking social support (4 items, α= .72). For the adaptation process, the scale was first translated and adapted to the Turkish language by the researcher and two bilingual experts in Psychology and Curriculum and Instruction. The “decentering” method was employed, and the translated version was back-translated to the English language by three different translators. Afterward, the original and the back-translated versions were compared to assert the equivalence in these two versions. A cognitive interview was also done with one eight grade student to unravel the unclear words, phrases, sentences, and directions. Consequently, a Measurement and Evaluation and a Turkish Philology expert also commented on the final version to provide face validity evidence. Finally, the scale was made ready for the study.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed through Mplus 6 to validate the factor structure of AERQ. For Study 1, CFA revealed a significant chi-square value with RMSEA=.042, CFI=.88, NNFI=.86, and SRMR =.067. The reliability estimates were also computed for situation selection (α=.69), developing competence (α=.65), redirecting attention (α=.77), reappraisal (α=.68), suppression (α=.67), respiration (α=.81), venting (α=.77), social support seeking (α=.73). Accordingly, six items were included in the scale based on the scale developers' feedback to increase the reliability of the relevant dimensions. For Study 2, CFA yielded a significant chi-square value with RMSEA=.04, CFI=.86, NNFI=.85, and SRMR =.06. As two additional items were not working properly, they were dropped from the instrument. The final measurement model was deemed acceptable; RMSEA = .03, CFI =.90, NNFI = .89, and SRMR=.049 (Browne & Cudeck, 1993; Hu & Bentler, 1999). Besides, the reliability estimates were computed for situation selection (α=.75), developing competence (α=.74), redirecting attention (α=.73), reappraisal (α=.58), suppression (α=.57), respiration (α=.76), venting (α=.80), social support seeking (α=.73). Although there was no problematic item for reappraisal and suppression dimensions regarding item-total correlations, lower reliability might be related to the low number of items in these dimensions (Taber, 2016). Besides, their reliability estimates were below .70 for the original scale. Buric et al. (2016), indeed, attempted to increase the reliability by including additional items in their validation studies. The problem may also pertain to the inferred meanings for the items on these dimensions. They were deemed difficult to understand by middle school students concerning their life experiences and emotional maturity. As the original items were administered to high school students in a different cultural context, these reasons sound plausible to some extent that requires further analyses with a different group of participants regarding the continuity of the validation processes.

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