Achievement and motivation

Learner motivation has been one of the central constructs with a perennial scholarly interest in the Educational Psychology literature (Wentzel & Miele, 2016). This is not surprising considering the role that academic motivation plays in giving rise to learning engagement and fostering academic competence (Elliot et al., 2017). Furthermore, the malleability of motivation through theory-based interventions as well as systematically designed modifications of contextual factors (e.g. school climate, instructional practice) has rendered student motivation as a psychological construct that educational psychologists and educators alike would direct their attention to and spend their resources on (Liem & McInerney, 2020).

Originating from the Latin word “movere” which means “to move,” many scholars have defined motivation to psychological (and physiological) forces that energise, direct, and sustain students’ behaviours towards the attainment of goals (Schunk et al., 2014), while some others simply refer it to the psychology of wanting (Baumeister, 2016). All of them, however, agree that motivated students are more likely to engage in their learning, persist in the face of challenges, spend longer time on-task, and put forth more effort expenditure than their less motivated peers (Elliot et al., 2017; Schunk et al., 2014; Wentzel & Miele, 2016).

The present issue comprises seven empirical papers that, I believe, significantly contribute to the academic motivation literature and advance our understanding of the role of motivation in empowering learning and building competence. Based on a social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), the preponderance of these studies represented motivation as sociocontextually shaped motivational beliefs including achievement goals, self-efficacy or self-concept, and school valuing, among others.

Achievement goal theory has been one of the “big” theories of motivation that has evolved and continued to grow in the past four decades (Elliot & Hulleman, 2017; Liem & McInerney, 2018). However, the theory is not free from debates, one of which is with regard to the dimensionality of its key constructs. This was a reason why Strunk et al. (2021) focussed their attention on mastery-avoidance goals. They conducted a meta-analytic onfirmatory factor analyses (MA-CFA) on responses to two widely used achievement goal measures: the Achievement Goal Questionnaire-Revised (AGQ-R) and the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales (PALS). Their finding showed that CFA models fit the data better without mastery-avoidance goals. Rather controversially, Strunk et al. concluded by calling for researchers to consider excluding mastery-avoidance goals in their research.

Considering popular day-to-day expressions (e.g. “Thank God It’s Friday,” “Motivation Monday”), Sotak et al. (2021) examined changes in the weekly patterns of undegraduates’ motivation. To this end, they collected data over 56 consecutive days to allow them to detect motivational cycles and fit trigonometric functions to the data via spectral analysis. Their findings indicated that motivation followed a cosine function with a weekly cycle, in which motivation began to increase on Sunday and was relatively high early-week, dropped on Friday, and was lowest on Saturday. Not only do these findings advance our understanding of the motivation of undergraduate studenst in important ways, universities may also draw applied implications for promoting the motivation and mental health of their students.

In a study that involved students of Indigenous background, Martin et al. (2021) compared 472 Indigenous and 15,884 non-Indigenous students from the same 54 high schools in Australia in terms of their motivation and engagement. Although the Indigenous students were found to have lower levels of motivation and engagement than their non-Indigenous counterparts, these differences significantly diminished after controlling for the students’ age, gender, socioeconomic status, and prior achievement. Martin et al. also found that Indigenous students’ positive motivation and engagement (e.g. self-efficacy, mastery orientation, school valuing) predicted key educational outcomes (aspirations, buoyancy, homework completion, achievement) to a significantly greater degree than did their negative motivation and engagement (e.g. anxiety, self-handicapping). These findings provided a basis to identify ways in which the educational outcomes of Indigenous students can be fostered. Aligned with the Positive Psychology principle highlighting individual strengths rather than deficits (Suldo, 2016), therefore, there is a value in placing the emphasis on the students’ positive motivation and engagement as well as their other personal potentials and assets.

In a study of 2807 Korean high school students, Lee (2021) examined the extent to which self-estimation bias in mathematics competence related to concurrent and prospective motivational costs or benefits, and if these associations differed as a function of the students’ achievement levels. High-achieving students were found to experience short-term and long-term benefits of their overestimated competence, although these motivational benefits seemed to taper off and no further benefit was detected after an optimal level of overestimation. In contrast, low-achieving students were found to experience short-term motivational benefits even with extreme overestimation, but these short-term benefits out of extreme overestimation turned out to be a “poisoned chalice,” as their inflated self-confidence was not accompanied by the correspondingly high levels of necessary skills and knowledge to bolster it. Clearly, these findings hold important implications for intructional practices and educational interventions seeking to nurture more realistic self-estimation of competence of low-achieving students and to identify ways in which their actual academic skills and knowledge can be systematically strengthened.

In a study conducted in Israel, Zysberg and Schwabsky (2021) tested the function of self-efficacy in mediating the links between school climate (i.e. interpersonal relations, violence, and sense of beloging) and academic achievement (grades in English and mathematics and self-reported performance) among 1641 middle and high school students. Their findings supported the hypothesised model, with students’ perceived interpersonal relations and sense of belonging positively predicting their self-efficacy which, in turn, positively predicted all the three indicators of their achievement. This finding leave us with an optimistic note that individual students’ achievement can be promoted by altering organisation-related characteristics that can be harnessed to nurture positive social relationships among school members and school belongingness in students.

Moving to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Stocker et al. (2021) tested the cross-cultural generalisability of the Internal/External (I/E) Frame of Reference Model and its Dimensional Comparison Theory (DCT) extension in a sample of 990 high school students. In doing so, Stocker et al. focussed on the relationships between self-concept and achievement in Arabic, English and mathematics. Their findings showed positive paths between achievement and self-concept in the same curricular domain and negative paths across curricular domains. Further, although boys reported a higher level of mathematics self-concepts, differences in achievement were found to be in favour of girls. Taken together, the dynamics of the relationships between achievement and self-concept within and across domains found among these UAE adolescents were aligned with what the I/E and DCT models would predict.

Godwin et al. (2021) tested the “time on-task” hypothesis which posits that the amount of time students devote to an instructional task determines the extent to which learning occurs. Their research is especially important because although prior research has generally found a positive relationship between time on-task and achievement, the strength the correlation varied across studies that notably had operationalised time differently. In view of these substantive-methodological gaps, Godwin et al. used an existing data set of 20 K-4 classrooms in the United States to examine if operationalising time in a consistent manner yielded a more stable association between on-task behaviour and learning. Their analyses revealed that, on the whole, on-task behaviour was positively correlated with learning, even after controlling for gender, school type, and school level. However, the findings showed that the correlation was generally weak and that the correlation strength was considerably variable, suggesting that the relative variation documented in prior studies was not attributable to operationalisation issues alone.

In summary, the seven papers in this issue have invited us to consider educational implications for promoting students’ achievement through enhancement of their motivation and motivated engagement. Each of the papers has gone through a rigorous and iterative process of review, and I would like to sincerely thank the reviewers who have provided their valuable inputs to bring the papers to their highest quality. I am also grateful to the editorial team who has facilitated the review process of these papers. The field of student motivation, and by implication the educational policies and practices derived from its empirical research, can only benefit from the theoretical depth and methodological rigour of each of the studies reported in this issue. I believe you will enjoy reading this issue and appreciate the insights from each of the papers!