Motivation and de-motivation in secondary education: Student characteristics

Abstract

Many teachers and parents complain that a substantial subgroup of pupils in high school lacks the right kind and/or the necessary level of motivation for school work. In the main part of this study, data from 1824 pupils in three types of secondary education show that the de-motivated and well motivated groups of pupils can be identified in terms of their scores on several traditional motivational predictor measures that are firmly rooted in cognitive theories of motivation: achievement motivation, test anxiety, intrinsic versus extrinsic orientation, causal attributions of successes and failures, and expectancy-value theories. High, medium and low motivated subgroups are formed on the basis of students' self-ratings and teachers' ratings (criterion measures). Based on these positive findings, we use then in the final part, the cognitive theories of motivation from which the predictor measures were derived to formulate a number of suggestions to prevent or remediate motivational problems in high school.