Students’ everyday school life is characterized by different emotions. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in student emotions as they can affect future learning and performance (Pekrun, 2017). Empirical findings indicate that positive emotions such as enjoyment are connected with factors such as academic interest, motivation, and high achievement (e.g., Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012) while negative emotions such as boredom impede interest, intrinsic motivation, and deep learning (cf. Pekrun, 2017). Longitudinal research has shown that positive emotions decline during secondary education (e.g., Hagenauer & Hascher, 2010), especially after the transition from primary to secondary education. Regarding negative emotions, there is empirical evidence that they remain stable (e.g., Hill et al., 2016) or even increase e.g., boredom (e.g., Vierhaus et al., 2016). Thus, there is a need to counteract this unfavorable development which in turn calls for research that aims at better understanding the antecedents and development of learning emotions.

According to the control-value theory (CVT) of achievement emotions (Pekrun, 2006), control and value appraisals are regarded as the proximal antecedents of achievement emotions. Perceived control refers to the controllability of an action or a result, that may be determined by either oneself or external factors. Perceived value comprises the goal relevance and the perceived direction of a learning activity (positive vs. negative) (Pekrun & Perry, 2014). Therefore, achievement emotions are based on the combination of control and value appraisal whereby different combinations of control and value appraisals lead to different achievement emotions. For example, high values in perceived control and positive value appraisals of a learning activity lead to positive emotions such as enjoyment, while negative values appraisals lead to negative emotions such as frustration (cf. Pekrun, 2006).

Existing research has shown that achievement emotions as well as control and value appraisals are context specific (Goetz et al., 2007). Therefore, this study focuses on the domain-specific emotions and appraisals in mathematics in early secondary education. We focus on examining four different achievement emotions enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom, as these are of primary importance and are prevalent in mathematic instruction (cf. Frenzel et al., 2007). Moreover, together they cover a broad variety of different achievement emotions of everyday school life.

Overall, there is a broad agreement on the relationships between control and value appraisals and achievement emotions. These well-studied relationships are complemented by another assumption of the CVT, which has been much less investigated: CVT assumes that changes in control and value appraisals lead to changes in perceived achievement emotions (cf. Buff, 2014). More concretely, it is expected that an increasing level of control and value appraisals raises the level of positive emotions and lowers the level of negative emotions. Accordingly, changes in the antecedents control and value are associated with the changes in achievement emotions over time. These change-change processes focus on intraindividual changes, their causes and consequences, and provide implications on how learning environments should be designed (Buff, 2014, p. 22). Thus, this assumption is particularly important for intervention research that seeks to increase both perceived control and perceived value, as such a program would be the most effective in promoting positive emotions (cf. Buff, 2014).

Our research paper addresses the question if an intervention setting with the aim of promoting positive emotions and learning motivation could change control and value appraisals of low-achieving secondary school students over two school years. Furthermore, we address the change-change process for the achievement emotions enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom. We assume that positive interindividual changes in perceived control and value longitudinally predict positive intraindividual changes in enjoyment and negative intraindividual changes in anger, anxiety, and boredom.

The present study is part of the project “Maintaining and fostering students' positive learning emotions and learning motivation in maths instruction during early adolescence (EMo-Math)” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The study is set within a quasi-experimental design with two experimental groups and one control group. The sample consists of 348 students, with a mean age of 12.75 (SD = .64) at the first measurement point, from 22 classes in the lowest ability tier of secondary education in the German-speaking part of the canton Berne. Of the total, 179 of the students are female (51.4%) and 169 are male (48.6%). 134 students participated in a combined student-teacher intervention; 122 students participated in a student intervention, and 92 students were in the control group. The 256 students from the two intervention groups attended identical workshops: two in the autumn term and two in the spring term. The content of the student and teacher intervention was primarily based on basic need satisfaction according to the self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2002) and the support of positive emotional experience based on CVT (Pekrun, 2006). Through these workshops, psychological processes should be triggered in the sense of social-psychological interventions (cf. Yeager & Walton, 2011), which may influence the trajectories of students’ experiences. All students completed a questionnaire three times over the two school years: at the beginning of Grade 7, at the end of Grade 7, and at the end of Grade 8. In order to test our hypotheses, latent change models (Steyer et al., 1997) were conducted. This latent change models can provide the analysis of inter-individual differences in intra-individual change, since intra-individual change between two measurement points is modeled as a latent variable (McArdle, 2009). The modeling of the present study is based on a neighbor change model, thus the between two adjacent measurement points is analyzed. Given the multicollinearity among the emotions, the latent change models were estimated separately for the different emotions.

Our results of the latent change models revealed no significant effect of the intervention on the intraindividual change of perceived control or perceived value (ßΔ control 1= -.065, p = .474; ßΔ control 2= .000, p = .997; ßΔ value 1= .071, p = .340; ßΔ value 2= .081, p = .263). Therefore, it must be assumed, that the intervention had no effect on promotion of control or value appraisals. To check the change-change assumption, the latent change model contained the latent change values of control (Δcontrol 1 / Δcontrol 2) and value (Δvalue 1 / Δvalue 2) as predictors of the change of the achievement emotions. Interindividual differences in intraindividual change in enjoyment of learning between the first and second measurement point was significantly predicted by change in control (ß = .470, p ≤ .001) and change in value (ß = .253, p ≤ .001). Between the second and third measurement point, change in enjoyment was only significantly predicted by change in control (ß = .453, p ≤ .001). For the negative emotions (anger, anxiety, and boredom) model results revealed that interindividual differences in intraindividual change between two adjacent measurement point were significantly negatively predicted by change in control and change in value (except change in value between the second and third measurement point on anxiety). These results confirmed the expected change-change assumption of the CVT for perceived control and value and enjoyment, anger, anxiety, respectively boredom: Intraindividual changes in these emotions were longitudinally predicted by intraindividual changes in perceived control and value. The more positive perceived control and value developed over the two school years, the more positive is the change in enjoyment, anger, anxiety, and boredom.

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