Which kind of motivation best predicts students' grades?
How good students believe they are at a subject predicted their later grades better than any other motivation measure, even after accounting for intelligence and earlier grades.
Source
The Importance of Students' Motivation for Their Academic Achievement - Replicating and Extending Previous Findings
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Prospective school study: motivation questionnaires and an intelligence test at one time point, report-card grades from before and about four months after testing; relative weight analysis.
- N
- N=345 · 345 upper-secondary students (11th and 12th grade) from two German academic-track schools.
- Population
- German Gymnasium students, average age about 17.5
- Outcome
- Report-card grades in math, German and overall GPA at the end of term
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What they did
The researchers tested upper-secondary students at two German academic-track schools during regular classes. Students rated their ability self-concept, task values, goal orientations and achievement motives (hope for success, fear of failure), each measured separately for school in general, math and German, and took an intelligence test. The schools supplied report-card grades from before and after testing, and relative weight analysis estimated how much unique variance each predictor explained.
What they found
Ability self-concept was the strongest motivational predictor in every domain, still explaining about a fifth of the explained variance in math grades and a tenth in German grades once intelligence and prior grades were included. Prior grades were by far the largest single predictor. Hope for success and fear of failure came next among motivational variables, task values and learning goals mattered more for specific subjects than for GPA, and performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals added little or nothing.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is correlational, so it cannot show that raising self-concept would raise grades; self-concept partly reflects feedback from earlier grades. The sample came only from the highest academic track in Germany, so intelligence varied less than usual, which may have shrunk its apparent importance. Grades rather than standardized tests were the outcome, only linear variable-centred models were used, and the analysis worked with observed scores that carry measurement error.
Key terms
- Ability self-concept
- A student's belief about how capable they are in a subject or in school generally.
- Task values
- How interesting, useful and personally important a student finds a subject, from expectancy-value theory.
- Goal orientation
- The reasons a student pursues learning, such as mastering material versus appearing competent or avoiding effort.
- Achievement motives
- Relatively stable tendencies to approach success (hope for success) or avoid failure (fear of failure).
- Relative weight analysis
- A regression method that splits explained variance among correlated predictors to show each one's relative importance.
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Quiz yourself
Which predictor explained the most variance in later grades?
Common questions
If prior grades explain so much, why does self-concept matter?
Because self-concept still explained a meaningful share of later grades even with prior grades and intelligence in the model, so it is not just a mirror of past performance.
Does this mean intelligence is unimportant for grades?
Not in general. In this academically selected sample intelligence scores were fairly similar across students, which limits how much they could predict.
Why measure motivation separately for math and German?
The authors argue predictors should match the specificity of the outcome; motives measured only in general terms may underestimate their link to subject grades.
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