Applying Emotion Regulation Strategies to Enhance Students’ Experience and Performance on Complex Tasks

When learning with complex tasks, many students encounter negative emotions such as anxiety, which can affect their learning experience and performance. While previous research shows that emotion regulation (ER) strategies can support student learning, the effects of ER strategies remain inconclusive. This study explored whether students improved affective experience and task performance on complex tasks after learning ER strategies. Moreover, this study investigated whether individual differences in task proficiency and self-agency influenced student experience and performance in such situations. The results show that after learning ER strategies, students’ positive emotions increased and their negative emotions decreased, and this was not affected by individual differences. Besides, low-performing students made an improvement in their task performance after learning ER strategies; high-performing students didn’t show improved performance although they demonstrated greater motivation to use ER strategies than low-performing students. Students with high levels of self-agency demonstrated greater motivation and engagement in using ER strategies than those with low levels of self-agency. Some students mentioned that even after learning ER strategies, they still struggled with negative emotions such as anxiety and frustration, mainly due to challenging tasks, time issues, and misaligned expectations. The implications of the findings were discussed.