Emotional profiles and their impact on self-efficacy, strategy use, and performance in multimodal reading among primary school students

Multimodal texts, which integrate elements such as images, tables, and videos, require more strategic navigation and psychological adaptation than single-modal texts. While existing research has acknowledged the importance of emotions, self-efficacy, and strategy use in paper-based reading, how these factors interact in more complex multimodal reading contexts remains largely unexplored, particularly from a person-centered perspective. This study addresses this gap by examining the relationships between self-efficacy, strategy use, and multimodal reading performance in young learners with varied emotional profiles. A total of 915 primary students (mean age = 9.95) completed a one-hour multimodal reading task in Chinese, followed by a questionnaire assessing self-efficacy, strategy use (metacognitive, cognitive, and supportive), and emotions. Latent profile analysis identified three emotional profiles among young multimodal readers: positive, moderate, and negative. Students in the positive profile demonstrated the highest levels of reading performance, self-efficacy, and strategy use. In contrast, students in the moderate and negative profiles showed comparable performance, despite the negative group reporting more frequent use of supportive strategies. Multigroup path analysis revealed that although the impact of self-efficacy on strategy use remained stable across emotional profiles, the effectiveness of strategy use on multimodal reading performance varied. Specifically, metacognitive strategies were most effective for the positive group, supportive strategies benefited the moderate group, and no strategies significantly improved performance for the negative group. These findings underscore the stability of self-efficacy and the critical role of emotions in influencing the effectiveness of strategy use in multimodal reading.