High school students’ feelings: Discoveries from a large national survey and an experience sampling study

Highlights

• High school students' feelings were studied in two US samples (N₁ = 21,678; N₂ = 472).

• Methods included open-ended questions, rated items and Experience Sampling Method.

• 75% of all feelings students reported in their open-ended responses were negative.

• Feeling tired was the most prominent feeling, across measures and samples.

• Negative feelings about school prevailed across all demographic groups.

Abstract

We investigated students' feelings at high school in a nation-wide survey of 21,678 US students (study 1), and in a four-week study using experience sampling methodology (ESM) with 472 students across 5 high schools (study 2). Both studies combined mixed methods, including open-ended questions and rating scales (e.g., PANAS). In study 1, seventy-five percent of the feelings students reported in their responses to open-ended questions were negative. The three most frequently mentioned feelings were tired, stressed, and bored. Similar findings emerged with rated items, The prevalence of negative feelings was largely similar across demographic groups. Study 2 largely corroborated the findings from study 1. Although the retrospective measures showed similar results to study 1, the in-the-moment measures also showed frequent positive feelings. We discuss the findings in light of the ‘sleep deprivation epidemic’, the achievement motivation literature, and implications for the validity of state- and trait measures of academic emotions.

Introduction

Students spend at least one quarter of their waking lives in school (Hamre & Pianta, 2010), making school a context that powerfully shapes the course of youth development (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). High school is an environment where adolescents begin to form their personal and social identities, develop meaningful relationships, and learn essential life skills to attain future goals and make important life choices (Dick & Rallis, 1991; Marttinen et al., 2017; Noack, Kracke, Gniewosc, & Dietrich, 2010; Simpkins, Davis-Kean, & Eccles, 2006).

Given the impact of school time on youth development, students’ school experiences students matter. In particular, the feelings students experience during their time at school influence their motivation, wellbeing, and achievement (Brackett & Rivers, 2014; Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000; Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002). Recent studies suggest that negative feelings are frequent among high school students (Mojtabai, Olfson, & Han, 2016; Twenge, 2014; Twenge et al., 2010; Twenge, Zhang, & Im, 2004), but it is not well known exactly which feelings students experience and how often they are experienced, as most studies only focus on a small number of feelings or have small samples. Moreover, some recent studies suggest that retrospective assessments of feelings may be biased, compared to in-the-moment assessments (e.g., Goetz, Bieg, Lüdtke, Pekrun, & Hall, 2013). The studies presented here employ a mixed-methods approach to examine how high school students feel at school, and tests the generality of findings by comparing open-ended and self-rated retrospective reports (study 1) and in-the-moment ratings (study 2).

This study examines students' emotions and feelings at school. When referring to these terms, we build upon constructionists theories of emotions, which state that emotions are results of social, cultural, and idiosyncratic constructions of the mind and result from a person's interpretations of experienced arousal, valence, and potency/intensity, and from the person's theories and knowledge about the causes and meanings and these affective experiences (see Barrett, 2006; 2012; Russell, 2003). In our definitions and measures of emotions, we take into account arguments raised by constructionist theories of emotions, according to which there is much idiosyncrasy in regard to how emotions are experienced (Feldman Barrett & Wager, 2006), how their structure differs between individuals (Feldman Barrett & Wager, 2006), and how they co-occur with each other in different individuals (e.g., Moeller, Ivcevic, White, & Brackett, 2018).

In addition, our definition of emotions in this article builds upon appraisal theories stating that emotions result from individuals’ interpretations (appraisals) of the novelty, pleasure/valence, cause, compatibility with values and norms, urgency, and controllability of the experienced stimuli (e.g., Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003).

Furthermore, this study adopts the distinction between valence (positive versus negative; e.g., Watson & Tellegen, 1985), arousal (high versus low; e.g. Russell & Barrett, 1999), and approach versus avoidance motivation of an emotion (in line with dimensional emotion theories, e.g., Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1990; Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2010). We aim to capture these dimensions in our assessments.

While the three emotion theories (constructionist, appraisal, and dimensional) may seem separated and in part contradictory, their core assumptions can be integrated both theoretically and in terms of measurement models (Lange, Dalege, Borsboom, van Kleef, & Fischer, forthcoming). In line with this idea of possible integration of aspects of the different emotion theories, we combine the “constructionist” idea that distinct granular, specific emotions transport unique and insightful information (see Feldman Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007; Kashdan, Feldman Barrett, & McKnight, 2015; Tugade, Fredrickson, & Barrett, 2004), with the “dimensional” idea that granular emotions can be combined in such a way that the resulting emotion measures systematically capture valence, arousal, and approach versus avoidance motivation. For this integration, we use a partially theory-driven and partially exploratory multi-method approach to capture the aforementioned dimensions as well as emotional granularity in high school students.

We use the term emotion when referring to an established literature using that term (e.g., ‘academic emotions’) and when referring to affective experiences that constructionist and appraisal theorists would agree to label an emotion (for the consensus and debates among emotion researchers, see e.g., Ekman, 2016, and Lange et al., forthcoming).

To also capture the broad sense of students' affective experiences and avoid terminological ambiguities, we use the term feeling throughout this article when we address affective states that students report, but that might provoke a terminological debate among emotion researchers, such as students' responses indicating that they feel tired, judged, or “crappy”. This umbrella term –feelings– is used when it is unclear whether other emotion researchers would agree to label an experience an emotion. Because of the ongoing debate whether or not interest should be called an emotion (e.g., Silvia, 2005; 2008), we also use the umbrella term feeling to refer to experiences typically studied under the label of ‘academic emotions’ (e.g., interest, anxiety, boredom, see e.g., Pekrun, 2006), as well as experiences labeled ‘other affective states’ in the PANAS-X and much of the existing literature, like the feeling of tiredness (see Watson and Clark, 1999).

Furthermore, our research questions are informed by the previous research on gender differences in Math and STEM anxiety and the related discrepancies between situational and retrospective anxiety measures in this regard (Bieg, Goetz, Wolter, & Hall, 2015; Goetz et al., 2013; Moeller, Salmela-Aro, Lavonen, & Schneider, 2015; Pekrun et al., 2002).

The effects of schooling are in part characterized by the feelings students experience at school: For example, academic and social feelings experienced at school predict students' attention, motivation, academic performance, relationships, health, and well-being (Brackett & Rivers, 2014; Kochanska et al., 2000; Pekrun et al., 2002). Accordingly, how students feel at school, along with a range of other psychosocial factors, likely plays a major role in how attending school impacts youth development. What students feel at school (e.g., enjoyment vs. boredom, hope vs. discouragement) influences their academic success (Pekrun et al., 2002). Specifically, positive feelings such as enjoyment and interest correlate positively with academic achievement, because they are associated with students’ attention, concentration, engagement, and persistence in learning activities (Eccles, 2005; Schiefele, 1996). On the other hand, negative feelings like boredom and anxiety correlate negatively with achievement, although highly skilled students tend to be particularly prone to boredom (Ellis & Ashbrook, 1988; Larson & Richards, 1991; Ma, 1999; Meinhardt & Pekrun, 2003; Pekrun, Goetz, Daniels, Stupnisky, & Perry, 2010). Anxiety and boredom also are known to diminish cognitive resources and thus negatively impact school performance (Ellis & Ashbrook, 1988; Hembree, 1990; Pekrun et al., 2002; Pekrun et al., 2010).

Given the psychological and developmental significance of feelings in school, it is noteworthy that high school students now report more severe and chronic experiences of negative feelings in their lives. Compared with those growing up in past decades, adolescents today are more likely to show anxiety, depression, and feel as if they do not have much control over their lives (Mojtabai et al., 2016; Twenge, 2014; Twenge et al., 2010; Twenge et al., 2004). The results from the National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, for example, revealed a rise in major depressive episodes from 8.7% in 2005 to 11.3% in 2014 in adolescents – the largest single rise since data have been collected (Mojtabai et al., 2016). Moreover, feelings of tiredness and fatigue are endemic due to increasing sleep deprivation among U.S. adolescents (National Sleep Foundation, 2006; Owens et al., 2014). Moreover, colleges have reported increases in mental health issues related to negative feelings, such as anxiety and feeling depressed (Center for Collegiate Mental Health; 2016).

Globally, the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) of 15-year olds found that the U.S. ranked 48th among 65 countries in their reported happiness at school, lower than the average of countries in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD, 2013). Furthermore, the frequency of negative feelings among high school students seems to be an international problem. A recent survey of over 7000 German secondary school students found that 43% of them felt stressed “often” or “very often”, and one out of three of these frequently stressed students suffered headaches, back pain, or sleep problems at least once a week (IFT-Nord, 2017). The same report found that 36% of the students felt tired due to schoolwork and 40% felt overwhelmed by schoolwork.

While the studies described above offer insights into the rise of negative feelings that adolescents experience, they are limited in regard to the age range of the participants, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), the range of the feelings examined in the studies, and the specific location (e.g., home or school) where the feelings were experienced. In particular, there is a lack of systematic comparisons of broad sets of feelings across demographic groups. Hence, it is not well known whether particular demographic student groups experience different feelings at school, and if so, which exact feelings that would be. We therefore explore the prevalence of students' different feelings at school in a large national survey. In order to find out whether the prevalence of students' feelings at school is universal across different demographic groups or specific to particular subgroups of students, we explore the relation of gender, SES, and ethnicity on students' feelings. This is an exploratory research question, because of inconclusive and contradicting findings in previous studies. While many studies have examined the relation between students’ feelings and emotions and diverse person characteristics and demographics, we believe that this is the first study to explore this relation in a large national sample.

Results on the influence of gender on students’ feelings at school is inconclusive. Studies applying retrospective measures often find generally higher levels of distress, anxiety, and depression among female students in both school and higher education (Bayram & Bilgel, 2008; Chapell et al., 2005; Jadoon, Yaqoob, Raza, Shehzad, & Zeshan, 2010; Dyrbye, Thomas, & Shanafelt, 2006; Locker & Cropley, 2004; Mousavi, Haghshenas, & Alishahi, 2008; Wiklund, Malmgren-Olsson, Öhman, Bergström, & Fjellman-Wiklund, 2012; but for contradicting evidence see; Deb, Chaterjee, & Walsh, 2010). Much of the research on gender differences in feelings at school focuses on domain-specific Math and Science anxiety and suggests that females tend to feel more anxious about STEM subjects (Mallow, 1994; Udo, Ramsey, & Mallow, 2004; Udo, Ramsey, Reynolds-Alpert, & Mallow, 2001).

Retrospective measures also suggest that female students tend to experience less pride and enjoyment and more shame and hopelessness in Mathematics, compared to male peers (Frenzel, Pekrun, & Goetz, 2007). In addition to gender identity, the sexual orientation has also been found to impact students’ feelings at school; students who identified as neither male nor female and students with non-heterosexual orientations reported experiencing more negative feelings (e.g., feeling sad) and less positive feelings (e.g., feeling accepted and connected; White et al., 2018).

On the other hand, several previous studies suggest that such gender differences disappear if situational instead of retrospective measures are applied (Bieg et al., 2015; Goetz et al., 2013; Moeller et al., 2015) and that students' responses to retrospective measures (such as the question “how anxious do you typically feel … in Math”) might be confounded with gender-specific stereotypes (Bieg et al., 2015; Goetz et al., 2013; Moeller et al., 2015). Based on these findings, we would question whether the above-mentioned studies on gender differences in students’ feelings at school would have found different results if they had used situational instead of retrospective measures. However, the previous research is not entirely conclusive, since Schneider et al. (2016) found that male and female students reported similar situational emotions and feelings in Finnish secondary schools (Helsinki), but not in US high schools (East Lansing, Michigan). In the latter sample, females reported higher situational stress and lower situational positive feelings like happiness, confidence, and feeling active.

Studies with situational assessments are comparably rare and usually limited to small samples, due to the burden they imply for both researchers and participants. Thus, it seems currently unclear to what degree gender affects the affective experiences of students at school. The previous research on situational measures is limited and inconclusive, the previous research with retrospective measures has been discussed to be biased, and it is unknown whether previously reported differences between retrospective and situational assessments generalize to large samples, whether they replicate in US samples (Schneider et al., 2016 suggest that they might not), and whether they generalize to other feelings than anxiety. Because of the inconclusive findings in the previous research, we treat these research questions as exploratory.

The relationship between students' social-economic status (SES) and both positive and negative feelings is not well established. In one study, SES was correlated with students' feelings of belonging in school (Wang & Eccles, 2012). Interest and intrinsic motivation in reading, however, does not appear to be correlated with parents' educational level, a proxy for SES (Durik, Vida, & Eccles, 2006). More generally, studies suggest that happiness increases with SES or income (Gerdtham & Johannesson, 2001; Aaker, Rudd, & Mogilner, 2011), whereas other studies found income unrelated to happiness (Ahuvia, 2007; Ahuvia & Friedman, 1998). A third group of studies suggests that if finances are invested in life experiences such as travel, income is associated with greater life satisfaction (Dunn, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2011). However, much of this previous research has focused on adults, who may have more control over their income than high school students. Moreover, the relationship between SES and different feelings has not been systematically studied with regard to learning-related feelings, such as interest and boredom experienced in the school context. Because of the mixed findings in the previous research, we explore the relation between SES and students’ feelings at school rather than stating directed hypotheses.

Little is known about the relation of race and ethnicity to students’ feelings at school. Affect-related school behaviors and experiences such as engagement in school and school attachment were found to be on average lower among African-American students than among European-American students (Ainsworth-Darnell & Downey, 1998). Johnson, Crosnoe, and Elder (2001) found that African-American students reported lower levels of school attachment, but were more likely to pay attention and complete homework. Other studies have found that school identification was higher among African-American students than European-American students (Voelkl, 1997). Moreover, African-American students were found to experience more flow (a state of deep concentration and absorption in a current activity), as well as higher enjoyment, motivation, and positive affect in classrooms than any other racial group (Shernoff, Knauth, & Makris, 2000). These studies, however, generally survey a small number of students in a few selected schools, which does not allow for a systematic examination of how often students experience which feelings, and how these feelings differ across demographic groups.