Investigating students’ emotional self-efficacy profiles and their relations to self-regulation, motivation, and academic performance in online learning contexts: A person-centered approach

Emotional self-efficacy is a vital component in student academic engagement and performance, but few studies have identified emotional self-efficacy profiles from a person-centered perspective and examined their relations to self-regulation, motivation and academic performance in online learning environments. To address this gap, we performed latent profile analysis on a dataset of 318 students and identified four profiles, namely, low, average, above average with a low ability to handle the emotions of others and high emotional self-efficacy profiles. The results of a multinomial logistic regression further indicated that self-regulation (i.e., goal setting, time management, task strategies and help seeking) and motivation (i.e., identified regulation and external regulation) played significant roles in determining profile membership. Furthermore, students who possessed high emotional self-efficacy also achieved better academic performance than the other three profiles. The results not only reinforce the understanding of students’ emotional self-efficacy in online learning but also offer researchers both methodological and theoretical insights concerning students’ emotional self-efficacy. Moreover, the study also reveals a potential relationship between leveraging students’ self-regulation and motivation to improve their emotional self-efficacy in an online learning context.