Abstract
Rooted in Eccles and colleagues’ expectancy-value theory, this study aimed to examine how expectancies and different facets of task value combine to diverse profiles of motivational beliefs, how such complex profiles develop across a school year, and how they relate to gender and career plans. Despite abundant research on the association between gender and motivational beliefs, there is a paucity of knowledge regarding the gendered development of student motivational belief profiles in specific domains. Using latent-transition analysis in a sample of N = 751 ninth to tenth graders (55.9% girls), we investigated girls’ and boys’ development of motivational belief profiles (profile paths) in mathematics across a school year. We further analyzed the association between these profile paths and math-related career plans. The results revealed four motivational belief profiles: high motivation (intrinsic and attainment oriented), balanced above average motivation, average motivation (attainment and cost oriented), and low motivation (cost oriented). Girls were less likely than expected by chance to remain in the high motivation profile, while the opposite was true for boys. The math-relatedness of students’ career plans was significantly higher in the “stable high motivation” profile path than in all other stable profile paths.
Highlights
Motivation declines during adolescence, especially in STEM subjects
Rooted in Eccles and colleagues’ expectancy-value theory, this study aimed to examine how expectancies and different facets of task value combine to diverse profiles of motivational beliefs, how such complex profiles develop across a school year, and how they relate to gender and career plans
This study aimed to look beyond main-effects variable(correlation)-centered models to study the interrelations of gender, career plans, and change and stability in profiles of motivational beliefs
Summary
Motivation declines during adolescence, especially in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects. Girls’ and boys’ motivation declines across adolescence (Jacobs et al, 2002), girls report lower levels of mathematics interest (Frenzel et al, 2010) and competence beliefs (Watt, 2004) than boys Such gendered motivational beliefs in math and other STEM fields are related to gendered career plans (Lauermann et al, 2017; Lazarides et al, 2017). Most existing research that focused on the development of girls’ and boys’ motivational beliefs and the relations of such beliefs with career plans has been variable-centered One limitation of this approach is the underlying assumption that the associations between gender, motivational beliefs and career plans are similar across the whole continuum of low to high motivation. The present study aimed to overcome some of these limitations
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