Fostering early adolescents’ motivation: a longitudinal study into the effectiveness of social constructivist, traditional and combined schools for prevocational education

Abstract

Over the past decades, many schools have adapted towards social constructivism with the aim of enhancing students’ motivation. There are a variety of perspectives in educational theory, with social constructivist views standing in contrast to traditional views. Hence, we compared students’ motivation (levels and developments) in social constructivist schools, traditional schools and schools combining elements of both. A total of 489 grade-7 students from 10 schools and 20 classes of prevocational education participated in five measurement occasions. Multilevel analysis revealed that complex developmental trends differed meaningfully between classes for all four motivational constructs, i.e. intrinsic motivation, identified motivation, values, and performance avoidance, for mother language, and even more so for math. For most motivational constructs, levels were associated with the type of school students attended, and appeared lower in combined schools than in the other two types, while developments were not associated with the type of school attended.

Keywords:

• social constructivism
• early adolescence
• learning environments
• motivation
• prevocational education

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [411-07-124].