Emotions and motivation in mathematics education: theoretical considerations and empirical contributions

Emotions and motivation are important prerequisites, mediators, and outcomes of learning and achievement. In this article, we first review major theoretical approaches and empirical findings in research on students' emotions and motivation in mathematics, including a discussion of how classroom instruction can support emotions and motivation. Based on this review, we encourage researchers from mathematics education and other disciplines of educational research to combine their efforts. Second, we provide an overview of the contributions in this special issue, most of which reflect such a combination of efforts by considering perspectives from both mathematics education and other fields of educational research. Finally, we consider the neglect of intervention studies and outline directions for future research. We identify intervention studies that target emotions and motivation as one promising but so far underrepresented line of research in mathematics education and review results from existing intervention studies. For future research, we suggest that researchers should implement fine-grained concepts, assessment instruments, theoretical hypotheses, and methods of analysis tailored to the specific features of the mathematical domain to adequately investigate students' emotions and motivation in this domain.