Abstract

Cognitive, motivational, and emotional factors are the most important and effective factors of the students’ performance and academic lives. The role of achievement emotions related to cognitive and motivational factors is very important. According to the control value theory of achievement emotions, emotions can affect the cognitive and motivational resources, use of strategies, self-regulation, and as a result, academic improvement also can be affected by them. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of training positive achievement emotions on academic motivation and academic boredom in students of Dezful, University of Medical Sciences. The method was experimental with pretest, posttest design, and with a control group. The statistical population included all of the bachelor students of the mentioned university, including 478 people, 54 of whom were selected by multi-stage random sampling and were randomly put into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was trained in positive emotions training techniques (based on the positive achievement emotions training package) for ten 2-hours sessions. In this study, we used the academic motivation scale of Vallerand, and the academic burnout questionnaire of Berso, Salanova, and the statistical data were analyzed by descriptive statistics and analysis of covariance.

The findings of the intervention in the study showed that there is a significant difference between the means of the experimental and control group in the variable of academic motivation: (p ≤0.001) and academic exhaustion: (p≤0.001). The results showed that training positive achievement emotions has led to a significant increase in academic motivation and a decrease in academic exhaustion in the experimental group. These results have important implications about the importance of training positive achievement emotions and the good management of them for medical students and also can be used as a framework for modifying and regulating students’ emotions and improving their academic performance in universities of our country by professors and academic policymakers‎.