Patterns and Profiles in Studying Individual Differences in Motivation and Learning

• In Event: Motivation and Learning: What Is Provocative and/or Novel?

Abstract

The aim of this presentation is to provide an overview of person-oriented research on achievement goal orientations and how it adds to our understanding of individual differences in motivation and learning.

This approach conceptualizes students’ motivation in terms of dispositional tendencies to prefer certain goals and outcomes over some others in achievement-related contexts. Thus, instead of investigating specific goals or individual goal orientations and their effects on different factors, we focus on the patterning of goal orientations and how those patterns are associated with other educational outcomes such as achievement and well-being. In addition to drawing on the findings of our own studies, we will briefly review person-oriented studies conducted on the subject over the past three decades.

The diversity in conceptualizations, methods, and study samples complicates the interpretation of the findings, but some conclusions can be made. Students with qualitatively different achievement goal orientation profiles can be identified, and the extracted profiles are rather similar across studies. Further, it seems that such profiles are relatively stable over time and meaningfully associated with learning and various educational outcomes.

The findings suggest that focusing on the patterning of motivation variables instead of individual variables might provides some added value to understanding the role motivation plays in learning. As also shown, such an approach offers means for studying important interactions in learning situations. For example, students’ responses to specific situations seem to be a function of both the patterning of more general tendencies (e.g., achievement goal orientations) and the context (e.g., instruction). Then again, the patterning of situational motivation (e.g., the developmental dynamics between interest and self-efficacy over the course of a task) also seems to be predicated by both individual tendencies and the context. The implications of these insights for future research will be discussed.

Authors

• Markku J. Niemivirta, University of Oslo

• Antti-Tuomas Pulkka, National Defence University, Finland

• Anna Tapola, University of Helsinki

• Heta Tuominen, University of Helsinki