Good performance in difficult times? Threat and challenge as contributors to achievement emotions and academic performance during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as one of the most formidable global crises, leading to the disruptions to education systems worldwide and impacting learning attitudes and psychological well-being of various learner groups, including university students. In this context, students' appraisals of adverse learning situations play a key role. It is not just the learning situation, but rather students' appraisal of it which impacts their emotions, attitudes, and behaviors in academic context. The aim of the present study was to investigate how university students' challenge and threat appraisals were related to emotional learning experiences and learning outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the study focuses on the role of personal and external resources for learning in this context. Methods: Altogether, 428 students, who attended a Psychology lecture at one Austrian university, filled in a questionnaire about their challenge and threat appraisals of learning circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic, achievement emotions they experienced during this time as well as gender, proneness to anxiety, academic self-concept, and learning resources. Additionally, students' performance in the examination was recorded. Results: The structural equation model emphasizes a crucial role of challenge and threat appraisals for students' achievement emotions in learning and exam preparation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenge appraisals were the strongest predictor for pleasant emotions and threat appraisals were strongest predictor for unpleasant emotions. Proneness to anxiety was related to threat appraisal as well as to experience of more unpleasant and, surprisingly, to positive emotions in adverse learning situation. Academic self-concept and learning resources were identified as important resources for learning in adverse learning situation. Unpleasant achievement emotions were directly and negatively related to academic performance and may thus be seen as a critical variable and crucial obstacle to academic performance. Discussion: The present study provides implications for learning and instructions which could be implemented by universities in order to support learning and learning attitudes among university students in adverse learning situations.

Learning in Adverse Circumstances: Impaired by Learning With Anxiety, Maladaptive Cognitions, and Emotions, but Supported by Self-Concept and Motivation.

The COVID-19 summer semester 2020 posed many challenges and uncertainties, quite unexpectedly and suddenly. In a sample of 314 psychology students, it was investigated how they experienced learning and preparing for an end-of-semester exam, which emotions and strain they experienced, how academic performance was affected, and how personal antecedents of learning as important facets of a learner's identity could support or prevent overcoming adverse circumstances of learning. The participants of the study filled in a questionnaire about their achievement emotions and strain they experienced during learning and exam preparation as well as academic self-concept, motivation, gender, proneness to anxiety. Points achieved in the exam were also recorded. The interaction between the variables was investigated by a structural equation model. It showed that the investigated variables can be distinguished into two groups, variables that contribute mainly negatively to performance and variables with a positive contribution. Strain experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and unpleasant emotions "belong together" in the sense that they inhibit academic performance directly or indirectly. Proneness to anxiety in academic situations was related with higher levels of mental, emotional, and physical disturbances due to the COVID-19 situation. In contrast, motivation and a high academic self-concept acted as support for learning and performance. Both contribute to pleasant achievement emotions in the learning situation; moreover, motivation had a direct relationship to academic performance. The results from the present study do not only provide insight into important students' personal dispositions and their role for learning in adverse circumstances but also give advice how to strengthen students for successful learning.