ABSTRACT
Emotions are mentally represented in the conscious mind, and humans are able to communicate these representations using verbal language. Therefore, it is not surprising that research on emotions from early on used self-report methods. This is also true for research on educationally relevant emotions. Test anxiety was the first emotion in this field to receive widespread attention by researchers, and, from the beginning, progress in test anxiety research was closely connected to advances in the self-report measurement of this emotion, as detailed below. The first systematic self-report measure of test anxiety was developed in the 1930s at the University of Chicago (Brown, 1938) and was followed by a multitude of instruments assessing this emotion. Due to the dominance of test anxiety studies over the decades, issues of test anxiety measurement were at the center of debates about measurement until the 1990s. Over the past 15 years, researchers have begun to develop self-report scales measuring students’ emotions other than anxiety as well. However, to date, instruments of this type are few and far between compared to the host of test anxiety questionnaires available.
