Primary school students' achievement emotions in writing acquisition: Development of the AEQ ‐ WEES and links to students' writing competencies and social integration over time

BACKGROUND: Acquiring writing skills poses not only cognitive but also emotional challenges for many primary school students. Although achievement emotions have received increasing research attention in recent years, little is known about how these emotions unfold during the process of writing acquisition and how they relate to both academic and social outcomes in early schooling. AIMS: To address this gap, the present study introduces the newly developed Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Writing in Early Elementary School (AEQ-WEES), which is designed to assess students' emotions in early writing acquisition and validates the instrument. Utilizing a longitudinal design with two assessment points over the course of one school term, we further examined the extent to which students' emotions are associated with their achievement (alphabetic, grapheme-related and orthographic writing competencies) as well as with their social integration at school, controlling for gender, socioeconomic status and grade level. SAMPLE: = 7.18 years, SD = 2.50; 48.6% boys). METHODS: Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted for scale validation and latent structural equation models (LSEMs) were calculated to investigate associations over time. RESULTS: The AEQ-WEES exhibits excellent psychometric properties. The LSEMs further show that both anger and anxiety are negatively related to almost all of students' writing competencies over time when adjusting standard errors for schools, whereas only anxiety in writing acquisition is negatively related to social integration. Additionally, SES emerged as a significant factor associated with students' writing skills. Several relationships were significant when standard errors were corrected for school-level clustering; however, these relationships were no longer significant when standard errors were adjusted for class-level clustering. CONCLUSION: The findings highlight the close links between students' emotions, social integration and writing competencies.