Another theoretical foundation of our approach draws from
Boekaerts' (1992) model of adaptable learning which emphasizes
the need to differentiate between the different levels of generality
of the measurements of appraisals, suggesting that measures of
students' “task-specific appraisals” should be supplemented to
more general (trait-like) measures of their motivation and selfconcept.
From this perspective, to improve our understanding of
the complexity of students' emotional experiences during learning
it is necessary to investigate how they evaluate the specific
learning situations they are dealing with, that is the contribution
of both trait-like variables and task-specific appraisals on emotion
experiences in actual problem solving situations. The distinction
between levels of generality also applies to measures of emotion
with respect to their temporality: habitual emotional experiences
or in other words, emotions one usually experiences in given
settings constitute trait-emotions whereas emotion measured at a
particular point in time constitute state-emotions (e.g. Cattell &
Scheier, 1961; Goetz, Hall, Frenzel, & Pekrun, 2006). From the
perspective that it is our appraisals of a situation that give rise to
and shape our emotions we hypothesized that both a trait-like
appraisals (self-concept) and task-specific appraisals (metacognitive
experiences) would predict children emotion experienced
after problem solving