Keeping high schoolers on track and motivated to complete academic work is a perennial worry, one of many such concerns that took on a new dimension over the last year. Now, a study in the Journal of Educational Psychology indicates that there are six distinct motivational profiles into which students can fit and that a student’s motivational characteristics can change over time. What’s more, the general trend for kids is toward more intrinsic motivational patterns from year to year, and it seems that specific, controllable factors can influence this movement.
Researchers surveyed 1,670 high school students from central and northeastern Ohio over two consecutive years. In the first year, 685 students were in ninth grade, 588 were in tenth grade, and 397 were in eleventh grade. The sample was split 50.5 percent female and 49.5 percent male. Reflecting the racial and ethnic makeup of the two regions, 82.0 percent of students were White, 5.5 percent were African American, 6.2 percent were Hispanic, 3.4 percent were Middle Eastern, and 2.9 percent were Asian American. While socioeconomic status and test scores weren’t reported for individuals, the schools that students attended ranged from 12.9 to 72.5 percent economically disadvantaged, and performance indices ranging from 51.9 to 85.8 percent (out of 100) on their most recent state report cards.
Students’ academic motivation was assessed via eight survey items adopted from a scale developed in the 1990s. This scale assesses students’ motivation toward school activities from fully intrinsic (learning for the simple enjoyment of the task) to fully extrinsic (doing the task only because one is forced by others), with various stages in between. Students were surveyed on their academic motivations in spring 2016 and again in spring 2017. Only students who fully completed both surveys were included in the study, although the researchers did run some comparisons between two-year and one-year survey completers to determine that there were no significant differences between the groups. Because previous studies on this topic had indicated a connection, the researchers also looked at students’ sense of school belongingness and their prior achievement levels as factors potentially contributing to academic motivation. School belongingness was assessed during the 2016 data collection only, using a five-item survey adapted from the psychological sense of school membership scale. Achievement was measured using weighted student GPA.
All students fit into one of six motivational profiles: (1) “amotivated,” meaning they had extremely low levels of all types of motivation; (2) “externally regulated,” meaning moderate levels of external regulation and low levels of all other types of motivation; (3) “balanced demotivated,” low levels of all types of motivation in a balanced pattern; (4) “moderately motivated,” moderate levels of all types of motivation; (5) “balanced motivated,” high levels of all types of motivation in a balanced pattern; or (6) “autonomously motivated,” low levels of external regulation and moderately high levels of other more autonomous motivation types.
Students fitting the balanced motivated profile predominated in both years of the survey—36.59 percent of students in year one and 36.17 percent in year two—with students fitting the moderately motivated profile accounting for nearly 30 percent of students in each year, the second-largest profile. While the membership of those two profiles stayed the most stable, latent transition analysis showed that, depending on which profile they started in, between 40 and 77 percent of students changed profiles between years. And those changes were largely for the better, assuming that having more intrinsic motivation is “better.” For example, 8 percent of students fit the autonomously motivated profile in the first year, a share which increased to 11.4 of students in the second year. Meanwhile, membership in the amotivated profile shrunk from 2.8 percent of the total to 2.1 percent.
The researchers speculated that developmental maturity could be one reason for the changes in motivation. Moreover, results of the school belongingness survey consistently predicted students’ shift into more-autonomous profiles over time. When students had a higher sense of belongingness at school, they were statistically more likely to shift into a more-intrinsic motivational profile than to stay in the same profile. Students with higher belongingness scores were also more likely to stay in the same profile than to shift downward. Year one GPA likewise was a significant predictor of year two profile membership in a similar manner. The higher a student’s year one GPA, the more likely they were to stay put or shift upward. This was especially true for those starting in the “lower” profiles in year one.
The report concludes with the recommendation that schools should routinely assess students’ motivation to identify those who are most at risk for dropping out or underperforming. However, that would likely only benefit students falling into the two “lowest” profiles. It seems that making sure all students are fully connected to their schools and are achieving academically at their highest possible levels is a much stronger path toward increasing student motivation across the board.
SOURCE: Kui Xie, Vanessa W. Vongkulluksn, Sheng-Lun Cheng, and Zilu Jiang, “Examining high-school students’ motivation change through a person-centered approach,” Journal of Educational Psychology (February 2021).
