Exploring students’ affect and achievement goals in the context of an intervention to improve web searching skills

•Instructional support improved web searching skills of upper elementary students.•Students reported high levels of positive affect and low levels of negative affect.•Affect remained relatively stable during and across web searching sessions.•The data showed main effects of mastery approach goals on affect.•Results suggested an interaction between mastery approach and performance approach goals.

The present study assessed the effects of a short-term intervention designed to enhance students’ web searching skills, particularly query formulation, information selection and credibility evaluation. The study also explored students’ affective experiences during web searching and examined the influence of achievement goals on positive and negative affect. Using a longitudinal treatment/control design, 96 fifth and sixth graders searched for information on curriculum-related topics at four sessions. Positive and negative affect was measured before, during and after each search. Multilevel analyses showed that the patterns of change in searching skills differed across conditions, with experimental group showing significant growth throughout intervention in all searching skills, while the control group remained constant or worsened across sessions. Students also experienced high levels of positive and low levels of negative affect. Positive affect remained constant during and across sessions, while negative affect showed a quadratic trend during sessions and decreased slightly across sessions. Main effects of achievement goals on positive and negative affect were found only for mastery-approach goals. A mastery-approach by performance-approach goal interaction was found for negative affect.