Academic motivation and engagement : its nature and development in the final years of secondary education

The final years of secondary education seek to prepare students for independent learning at university and/or in the workforce. However, some students find it hard to make choices about courses and some even question why they are still at school. Developing and maintaining motivation and engagement appear to be the central tasks that can improve chances of future success. Teachers, parents and students themselves need a better understanding of the nature of motivation and how it can facilitate engagement over the final years of secondary education. The main purpose of the current thesis was to investigate the nature of and changes in motivation and how they are associated with engagement in learning in the college years. This study followed students from Years 10 to 11 and 12 and asked them to report on multiple facets of motivation and engagement in each year. In the first aspect of the study, factor analyses demonstrated that 11 factors described by Martin (2007), in his Student Motivation and Engagement Scale (SMES-HS), offer an adequate model to understand student motivation and engagement for each gender and in each year. This enabled a detailed study of the relationships between various motivational facets of engagement or disengagement in each year. The concurrent associations showed coherent patterns of adaptive cognitions and behaviours at all times, whereas the patterns of maladaptive cognitions and behaviours were less coherent. The associations between cognitions and behaviours were lower than the associations between cognitions or between behaviours. The second aspect of this study examined the longitudinal relationships between all 11 aspects of motivation and engagement. Results showed moderate to strong stability of motivational facets over the three years. Adaptive cognitions appeared more stable than other facets in boys; anxiety and self-handicapping in girls. Finally, the third aspect of the study examined how high or low the motivation was that students reported. Interestingly, the levels of adaptive cognitions were consistently high across the final three years of school, levels of adaptive behaviours moderately high and levels of maladaptive motivation and behaviours consistently low. Boys' reports showed high levels of disengagement while girls' reports showed high levels of anxiety. The present study demonstrates that the SMES-HS is an adequate tool to examine student motivation and engagement of college students over time. It has given insight into the complex motivational experiences of more engaged students. Further research is required to pursue this initial understanding of motivational orientations of college students by including students with both high and very low levels of motivation over time. Knowing the overall patterns of relationships between the motivational facets can assist students, teachers and parents in early identification of students at risk in the process of learning. Educators and parents can design specific intervention programs targeting individual facets of motivation to promote students' motivation and engagement in the college years. Limitations of the current study are discussed and recommendations for future research are presented