Expectancies, task values, and perceived costs: Reciprocal effects on math-related career intention and achievement among middle school girls

Abstract

There are ongoing efforts to understand female adolescents' motivation in math, as part of the science, technology, engineering, and math fields. The current study aimed to examine the temporal relations among expectancies, task values (intrinsic and utility value), and perceived costs (emotional and effort cost) in math to understand the underlying motivational processes for math-related career intention and achievement among middle school girls. To this end, we collected responses from 638 Korean middle school girls three separate times within a year. The autoregressive cross-lagged results revealed that there was no reciprocal relationship between expectancies and task values, but there appeared to be unidirectional positive prediction paths from utility value to self-efficacy. Regarding the costs, there were reciprocal relations between intrinsic value and emotional cost, which negatively affected each other. Consequently, utility value indirectly enhanced girls' math achievement by fostering self-efficacy, whereas emotional cost indirectly hindered their career intentions in math by dampening their intrinsic value. These findings suggest that it is important not only to increase task values, but also to manage costs to help adolescent girls adhere to their math-related career goals.