Ellen A. Skinner

Motivation in the classroom: Reciprocal effects of teacher behavior and student engagement across the school year.

On the basis of a new model of motivation, we examined the effects of 3 dimensions of teacher (n = 14) behavior (involvement, structure, and autonomy support) on 144 childrens (Grades 3-5) behavioral and emotional engagement across a school year. Correlational and path analyses revealed that teacher involvement was central to childrens experiences in the classroom and that teacher provision of both autonomy support and optimal structure predicted childrens motivation across the school year. Reciprocal effects of student motivation on teacher behavior were also found. Students who showed higher initial behavioral engagement received subsequently more of all 3 teacher behaviors. These findings suggest that students who are behaviorally disengaged receive teacher responses that should further undermine their motivation. The importance of the student-teacher relationship, especially interpersonal involvement, in optimizing student motivation is highlighted. What are the factors that motivate children to learn? Educators and parents value motivation in school for its own sake as well as for its long-term contribution to childrens learning and self-esteem. Highly motivated children are easy to identify: They are enthusiastic, interested, involved, and curious; they try hard and persist; and they actively cope with challenges and setbacks. These are the children who should stay in school longer, learn more, feel better about themselves, and continue their education after high school. Recent research has borne this out (Ames & Ames, 1984, 1985; Pintrich, 1991; Stipek, 1988). Although motivated students are easy to recognize, they are difficult to find. Research shows that across the preschool to high school years, childrens intrinsic motivation decreases and they feel increasingly alienated from learning (Harter, 1981). Why is it so difficult to optimize student motivation? Decades of psychological and educational research

Searching for the structure of coping: A review and critique of category systems for classifying ways of coping.

From analyzing 100 assessments of coping, the authors critiqued strategies and identified best practices for constructing category systems. From current systems, a list of 400 ways of coping was compiled. For constructing lower order categories, the authors concluded that confirmatory factor analysis should replace the 2 most common strategies (exploratory factor analysis and rational sorting). For higher order categories, they recommend that the 3 most common distinctions (problem- vs. emotion-focused, approach vs. avoidance, and cognitive vs. behavioral) no longer be used. Instead, the authors recommend hierarchical systems of action types (e.g., proximity seeking, accommodation). From analysis of 6 such systems, 13 potential core families of coping were identified. Future steps involve deciding how to organize these families, using their functional homogeneity and distinctiveness, and especially their links to adaptive processes.

Sense of relatedness as a factor in children's academic engagement and performance.

Children’s sense of relatedness is vital to their academic motivation from 3rd to 6th grade. Children’s (n 641) reports of relatedness predicted changes in classroom engagement over the school year and contributed over and above the effects of perceived control. Regression and cumulative risk analyses revealed that relatedness to parents, teachers, and peers each uniquely contributed to students’ engagement, especially emotional engagement. Girls reported higher relatedness than boys, but relatedness to teachers was a more salient predictor of engagement for boys. Feelings of relatedness to teachers dropped from 5th to 6th grade, but the effects of relatedness on engagement were stronger for 6th graders. Discussion examines theoretical, empirical, and practical implications of relatedness as a key predictor of children’s academic motivation and performance. When explaining motivational dynamics in school, psychologists frequently point to differences in children’s underlying beliefs and capacities. Decades of research show that children’s self-perceptions, such as self-efficacy, goal orientations, or autonomy, are robust predictors of motivation and performance in school, both concurrently and over many years (for reviews, see Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998; Stipek, 2002). At the same time, however, researchers note the centrality of social factors in children’s motivation (Connell & Wellborn, 1991; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Eccles et al., 1998; Goldstein, 1999; Juvonen & Wentzel, 1996; Resnick et al., 1997; Weiner, 1990). Research from multiple traditions demonstrates the impact on children’s motivation and learning of relationships with parents (Steinberg, Darling, & Fletcher, 1995), teachers (Stipek, 2002), and peers (Hymel, Comfort, Schonert-Reichl, & McDougall, 1996). Recently, these two general lines of thinking, one about selfperceptions and one about interpersonal relationships, have converged in the study of the motivational consequences of children’s sense of self in relationships. Studied under a variety of labels, such as social cognitive views of motivation (Weiner, 1990), internal working models (Bretherton, 1985), relationship representations (Ryan, Stiller, & Lynch, 1994), classroom climate (Anderson, 1982), and perceived social support (Wentzel, 1999), the core notion is that a history of interactions with specific social partners leads children to construct generalized expectations about the nature of the self in relationships. Also referred to as a sense of relatedness (Connell, 1990), connectedness (Weiner, 1990), or belonging (Goodenow, 1993), these organized self-system processes include views about the self as lovable (or unworthy of love) and about the social world as trustworthy (or hostile). Children rely on these beliefs when predicting, interpreting, and responding to social exchanges, and these exchanges can in turn be used to confirm or revise children’s beliefs. A sense of relatedness may function as a motivational resource when children are faced with challenge or difficulties. In times of stress, children who experience trusted others as “backing them up” respond with more vigor, flexibility, and constructive actions. A sense of relatedness is the focus of the present study. Building on the growing body of work on the role of relationship representations, we attempted to explore the effects of a sense of relatedness, both generally and toward specific social partners, on children’s academic motivation and performance during middle childhood.

A Motivational Perspective on Engagement and Disaffection: Conceptualization and Assessment of Children's Behavioral and Emotional Participation in Academic Activities in the Classroom

This article presents a motivational conceptualization of engagement and disaffection: First, it emphasizes childrens constructive, focused, enthusiastic participation in the activities of classroom learning; second, it distinguishes engagement from disaffection, as well as behavioral features from emotional features. Psychometric properties of scores from teacher and student reports of behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, behavioral disaffection, and emotional disaffection were examined using data from 1,018 third through sixth graders. Structural analyses of the four indicators confirm that a multidimensional structure fits the data better than do bipolar or unidimensional models. Validity of scores is supported by findings that teacher reports are correlated with student reports, with in vivo observations in the classroom, and with markers of self-system and social contextual processes. As such, these measures capture important features of engagement and disaffection in the classroom, and any comprehensive assessment should include markers of each. Additional dimensions are identified, pointing the way to future research.

Perceived control, motivation, & coping

Introduction Meta-Theoretical Assumptions Constructs of Control Antecedents of Perceived Control Consequences of Perceived Control Development of Perceived Control Intervention into the Competence System Empirical Study of Perceived Control

What Motivates Children's Behavior and Emotion? Joint Effects of Perceived Control and Autonomy in the Academic Domain

This study examined the contribution of perceived control and autonomy to childrens self-reported behavior and emotion in the classroom (N = 246 children ages 8-10 years). Multiple regression analyses revealed unique effects of autonomy over and above the strong effects of perceived control. In addition, both sets of perceptions (and their interaction) were found to distinguish children who were active but emotionally disaffected from those who were active and emotionally positive. Specific predictions were also tested regarding the effects of (a) control attributions to 5 causes and (b) 4 reasons for task involvement that differed in degree of autonomy on childrens active (vs. passive) behavior and 4 kinds of emotions: boredom, distress, anger, and positive emotions. Implications of the findings for theories of childrens motivation are discussed, as well as for diagnostic strategies to identify children at risk for motivational problems

Control, Means-Ends, and Agency Beliefs: A New Conceptualization and Its Measurement During Childhood

We presented a new conceptualization of perceived control in which three conceptually independent sets of beliefs are distinguished: control beliefs, expectations about the extent to which agents (e.g., the self) can obtain desired outcomes; means-ends beliefs, expectations about the extent to which certain potential causes produce outcomes; and agency beliefs, expectations about the extent to which agents possess potential means. In a study of 155 children from Grades 2, 4, and 6, we demonstrated that childrens questionnaire responses reflected the distinction between these beliefs. Factor analyses of the items for each known cause separately revealed the predicted three factors, marked by control, means-ends, and agency items, respectively. Likewise, factor analysis of the scale scores resulted in control and agency beliefs factors as well as three factors for means-ends beliefs. Initial evidence on the usefulness of the new scheme indicates that control, means-ends, and agency beliefs show differential developmental trajectories as well as differential relations with cognitive performance.

Six Dimensions of Parenting: A Motivational Model

Objective. A motivational conceptualization provided the basis for identifying 6 core features of parenting style (warmth, rejection, structure, chaos, autonomy support, and coercion) and constructing 2 measures to assess them (1 for parents and 1 for children). Design. Self-report data were collected from independent samples of parents (N = 1212, 645 mothers and 567 fathers) and adolescent children (N = 3,752). Results. Models of multiple (unipolar) dimensions provided a significantly better fit than traditional models of bipolar dimensions. Moreover, correlations among dimensions suggested that dimensions can be aggregated in several ways. Conclusion. The conceptual framework and measures can contribute to future work on parenting, including research designed to map the many constructs that describe parenting, and studies that explore how parenting style shapes child and adolescent outcomes.

Review: The development of coping across childhood and adolescence: An integrative review and critique of research

Despite consensus that development shapes every aspect of coping, studies of age differences in coping have proven difficult to integrate, primarily because they examine largely unselected age groups, and utilize overlapping coping categories. A developmental framework was used to organize 58 studies of coping involving over 250 age comparisons or correlations with age. The framework was based on (1) conceptualizations of coping as regulation to suggest ages at which coping should show developmental shifts (Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2009), and (2) notions of hierarchical families to clarify which coping categories should be distinguished at each age (Skinner, Edge, Altman, & Sherwood, 2003). Developmental patterns in coping (e.g., problem-solving, distraction, support-seeking, escape) were scrutinized with a focus on common age shifts. Two kinds of age trends were discerned, one reflecting increases in coping capacities, as seen in support-seeking (from reliance on adults to more self-reliance), problem-solving (from instrumental action to planful problem-solving), and distraction (adding cognitive to behavioural strategies); and one reflecting improvements in the deployment of different coping strategies according to which ones are most effective in dealing with specific kinds of stressors. Results were used to formulate guidelines for future research on the development of coping.

Developmental Dynamics of Student Engagement, Coping, and Everyday Resilience

The goal of this chapter is to present a perspective on student engagement with academic work that emphasizes its role in organizing the daily school experiences of children and youth as well as their cumulative learning, long-term achievement, and eventual academic success. A model grounded in self-determination theory, and organized around student engagement and disaffection with learning activities, seems to offer promise to the study of academic development by specifying the dynamic cycles of context, self, action, and outcomes that are self-stablizing or self-amplifying, and may underlie trajectories of motivation across many school years. The study of ongoing engagement can be enriched by the incorporation of concepts of everyday resilience, focusing on what happens when students make mistakes and encounter difficulties and failures in school. The same personal and interpersonal resources that promote engagement may shape students’ reactions to challenges and obstacles, with academic coping an especially important bridge back to reengagement. Future research can examine how these motivational dynamics contribute to the development of durable academic assets, such as self-regulated learning and proactive coping, and an academic identity that allows students eventually to take ownership for their own learning and success in school.