College Students’ Epistemic Cognition, Epistemic Emotion, and Engagement: A Mediation Analysis

Abstract Background: The college students' engagement has attracted the attention of scholars from various countries because it can impact student’s learning performance, which in turn affects national social development. Epistemic cognition refer to individuals' understanding of the nature of epistemic, sources, and the criteria for its validation. Epistemic emotion, on the other hand, are the emotions experienced by individuals during the process of learning and serve as important factors influencing their learning experiences. Methods: This study posits that college students' epistemic cognition indirectly influence theirs’ engagement through epistemic emotion. This study focuses on undergraduate students from physical education in Zhejiang province of China. After excluding invalid questionnaires, a total of 558 valid questionnaires were collected. This study conduct item analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and reliability testing for the four scales. Moreover, we tested confirmatory factor analysis and the mediation effects in the proposed models. Results: The investigation conducted in this study revealed that college students' epistemic cognition positively influences their positive epistemic emotion and negatively influence their negative epistemic emotion. The mediating effect of student engagement was supported in the relationship between epistemic cognition and positive epistemic emotion, while the mediating effect in the relationship with negative epistemic emotion was not supported. Conclusions: More research is needed to explore the potential mediating effects of different variables between college students' epistemic cognitions and student engagement. Considering the current lack of research on the mediating effects of these three variables, future studies could continue to investigate the mediating effects of epistemic cognitions, epistemic emotions, and student engagement.