Development and Construct Validation of an Academic Emotions Scale

This article describes the development and two studies on the construct validity of the Academic Emotions Scale (AES). The AES is a French self-report questionnaire assessing six emotions in the context of school learning: enjoyment, hope, pride, anxiety, shame and frustration. Its construct validity was studied through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. A six-factor structure emerged from exploratory factor analyses on two different samples (N = 188; N = 516). These six factors correspond to six academic emotions. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the factorial structure of the final version of the AES. A hierarchical model with a second-order factor (valence) underlying the six first-order emotional factors was the most suited to the data. The psychometric characteristics of the AES justify the use of this questionnaire in future research.