The Relationship Between Students’ Experience with Summative Assessment, Emotional Regulation, and Trait Self-Esteem

Abstract

This study aims to look at the relationship between students’ experience with summative assessment, emotional regulation, and trait self-esteem. The area of assessment is a constant part of students’ lives and understanding more about the relationships it has to students’ well-being and mental health is critical. Assessment is an emotion provoking area and students’ experiences with assessment are likely to be related to the way they regulate their emotions and their self-esteem. Student trait self-esteem and emotional regulation relate to student well-being and mental health. Since summative assessment is also known to produce various emotions in students, this study embarked to present relationships between these areas in order to address this issue. A quantitative approach was taken, through the usage of an online questionnaire that was distributed to students and organized into three main themes. Trait self-esteem was looked at through the usage of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965), emotional regulation was looked at through the usage of Gross and John’s (2003) emotional regulation questionnaire, and students’ experience through the usage of new developed scales that addressed students’ emotional state throughout four various phases of the summative assessment. The findings of this study were four-fold: 1- there was a relationship between trait self-esteem and emotional regulation, 2- there was a relationship between students’ trait self-esteem and their experience before, during and after the summative assessment, including after receiving the grade, 3- there was no relationship between students’ emotional regulation and their experience with summative assessment, 4- there were no significant differences between students’ trait self-esteem, emotional regulation, and background characteristics. Along with these findings, the study has contributed to a better understanding of what further work needs to be done in order to better aid student learning. This study has also contributed methodologically by constructing four new internally reliable scales that address students’ emotional state during, before, directly after and after receiving the grade in a summative assessment experience. This study concludes that there is an importance in studying relationships between students’ experience with summative assessment and their trait self-esteem in order to enhance student learning in higher education.