Patterns and pathways: A person-oriented approach to understanding students' motivation to learn.

Abstract

Understanding achievement motivation is critical for reforming schools, increasing learning, and improving the lives of children and adolescents. Goals, values, and competence beliefs are primary influences on achievement motivation, but empirical work has rarely examined how these components of motivation function together. This study used a person-oriented approach that treats the individual as the unit of analysis to explore patterns of mastery and performance achievement goals (which focus on developing versus demonstrating competence), task values (beliefs about the interest, usefulness, or opportunity cost of tasks), and competence beliefs. Group differences, stability over one school year, and relations with math achievement and affect were explored. Participants were 1,870 students (primarily Vietnamese and Hispanic) taught by 40 teachers in 148 math classrooms in 7 urban middle schools. Questionnaires given at the beginning and end of seventh grade included items from Midgley's Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales and Eccles' Subjective Task Value scales. Cluster analysis revealed seven patterns of motivation associated with differences in negative and positive affect and later achievement. This person-oriented approach identified different combinations goals and values that were associated with positive affect and higher achievement. In one adaptive pattern, students reported moderate interest in math and a sole focus on mastery goals of developing competence, supporting a traditional perspective on how goals operate. In another, students focused on both developing and demonstrating competence, suggesting that goals function differently for different students. This research clarifies how goals operate by describing two adaptive patterns and combining theoretical perspectives on achievement goals. Across all clusters, cost value discriminated among adaptive patterns, suggesting that perceptions of the time and effort required to learn math play an important role in motivation. Ethnic and linguistic differences in cluster membership favored Vietnamese students and proficient English speakers. Findings indicate that focusing only on goals or values may give an incomplete picture of motivation, and that models that assume linear effects may mask complex interactions. Integrating goal and value constructs improved prediction of adaptive patterns. These findings help educators by highlighting multiple pathways between motivation and achievement, and the roles of both cost value and goals.