Motivation and post-secondary education

Motivation, emotion, and engagement are important and related factors in educational psychology. In this issue, eight papers investigated these factors in the secondary and post-secondary education.

DeBacker et al. (2018) implemented a one-shot growth mindset intervention with longitudinal design and found this intervention can promote incremental views of intelligence and reduce the prevalence of performance goals.

Prenger and Schildkamp (2018) indicated that teachers can improve their instruction which can lead to increased achievement results of students by applying the data based decision making.

Kokkinos and Voulgaridou (2018) investigated the links between self-esteem, perceived scholastic competence, motivation, and learning strategies. Results showed that all learning strategies can be predicted by perceived scholastic competence both directly and indirectly through intrinsic goal and can be predicted by self-esteem only indirectly through intrinsic goal motivation.

Filak and Nicolini (2018) utilized self-determination theory to understand the relationship between motivation, need satisfaction, teacher evaluations, and student experiences with courses in various modalities (i.e. face-to-face and online). Their outcomes demonstrated that higher levels of quality motivation positively predict need satisfaction in both the online and face-to-face environments. Furthermore, they found that in the factors of need satisfaction (i.e. autonomy, competence, and relatedness), competence, autonomy and relatedness independently predict positive evaluations of the instructor in face-to-face courses and only competence and relatedness were found to positively predict teacher evaluations in the online environment.

Hollimana, Martinb, and Collieb (2018) examined whether university students’ adaptability predicts degree completion via behavioral engagement by a longitudinal study. Findings showed that adaptability predicts both positive and negative behavioural engagement, and that negative (but not positive) behavioural engagement predicts degree completion. Adaptability was also found to influence degree completion indirectly via negative behavioural engagement.

Zábrodská et al. (2018) investigated the relationship of faculty burnout with psychosocial work environments, using the job resources-demands framework throughout public universities in the Czech Republic. The findings indicated that university management can most effectively address burnout in academic staff not only by implementing policies that reduce work-family conflict, workload and administrative paperwork, but also by providing more job resources to younger faculty and faculty involved in grant-based projects.

Chen, Ye, and Hangen (2018) explored how the grit including consistency of interest and perseverance of effort predicted achievement goals among two university student samples from American and Chinese cultures. They found that consistency of interest negatively predicted performance-avoidance goals, whereas perseverance of effort positively predicted all four achievement goals.

Gibbons, Xu, Villafañe, and Raker (2018) explored a reciprocal causation relationship between anxiety, enjoyment and achievement framed by the control–value theory of achievement emotions in a postsecondary organic chemistry course.

Bor-Chen [email protected]