Achievement Emotions Questionnaire - Short

AEQ-S (doc) AEQ-S (pdf) AEQ-S German (doc) AEQ-S German (pdf)

Background

The Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) is a well-established and widely used instrument for measuring achievement emotions. It covers the component structure of various emotions across three diffent academic settings. However, this breadth requires a total of 232 items distributed across 24 scales, making the AEQ difficult to use when administration time is limited. The AEQ-S addresses this issue by reducing the number of items to 96 (i.e., 4 items per scale), allowing much more economic assessments. Despite its brevity, the AEQ-S is a reliable instrument that maintains the AEQ’s conceptual scope and reproduces its structural relationships (e.g., with external criteria). This makes the AEQ-S a valuable instrument when administration time or space are limited.

The internal structure of the AEQ-S is identical to the AEQ, as it uses a subset of items from all AEQ sections and scales. Accordingly, the AEQ-S is organized in three sections: class-related emotions, learning-related emotions, and test-related emotions. Each section consists of eight scales, and each scale comprises four items pertaining to an individual achievement emotion. The AEQ-S maintains the component structure of the AEQ as well. Each scale measures the affective, cognitive, motivational, and physiological component of the corresponding achievement emotion with one item each (except the physiological component of hope, for which no items exist in the AEQ).

Usage

License

The Achievement Emotions Questionnaire - Short (AEQ-S) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In short, this license allows anyone to share and adapt the AEQ-S for any purpose and without requiring the authors’ permission. The only requirement is to give appropriate credit (see next section).

Citation

To give appropriate credit, please cite the following publication:

Bieleke, M., Gogol, K., Goetz, T., Daniels, L., & Pekrun, R. (2021). The AEQ-S: A short version of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 65, 101940. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101940

Adminstration

Administration

The AEQ-S can be administered in an online or in a paper-and-pencil format. Completing it takes about 15 minutes. The AEQ-S is a modular instrument, allowing researchers to use sections (e.g., learning-related emotions) and scales (e.g., test anxiety) individually. This reduces the administration time accordingly; for instance, a single scale with four items can be completed in less than a minute. Participants rate each of the eight items on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

Instruction

The instructions used for the AEQ-S focus on general emotional experiences across subjects (i.e., traits). However, they can also be changed to focus on emotions in a specific subject domain (e.g., math, sports) and/or emotions in a specific situation (i.e., states). It is not necessary to change the wording of the items.

Scoring and interpretation

An overall score for each scale is obtained by averaging a participant’s ratings across all four items. All items are formulated in the same direction so that no reverse-coding is neccessary.

FAQ

Can I use the AEQ-S in my study?

Yes. Just make sure to give appropriate credit in the resulting publications (see above).

Can I translate or otherwise modify the AEQ-S?

Yes. You can adapt the AEQ-S in any way you want, including translations into other languages. Just make sure to give appropriate credit in the resulting publications (see above).

Is the AEQ-S already available in languages other than English?

The AEQ-S has so far been validated in English. However, the items of the AEQ-S are drawn form a broader pool of original AEQ items, which have been translated in other languages and can therefore serve as a starting point for translating the AEQ-S. Naturally, these translations must then undergo thorough validation to ensure that their reliability and validity are maintained.