Társas összehasonlítás az iskolai motiváció tükrében

The aim of this study is to examine the social phenomena in connection with the desire to meet the requirements set for students in institutions of public education – mainly in high schools. The social milieu, in which we live and the people, who are important to us (e.g. our parents, our teachers and our classmates) play important roles during the years of our studies – they can support, accept and praise us but also can be strict and censorious. Positive and negative reinforcements like these and the comparison gained by them affect our motivations and our performance in school – they play an important role in forming how hard-working we are, whether we undertake to do more tasks and homework as expected and whether we do as much during studying as much needed to get good or even excellent notes. The aim of my research is - besides bringing an additional perspective to some aspects of the science of pedagogy – to draw attention to some beneficial and detrimental effects originating from social comparison. By exploring this process deeper and taking note of its details it is possible to build the system of feedback in such a way that fits the students’ personal needs and that orientate them to success. In order to examine social comparison, I used the Hungarian version of the questionnaire created by Gibbons and Buunk (1999), and school motivation was examined by the questionnaire created by Kozéki and Entwistle (1986). 17–19- year-old high school students participated in the study (62 people, 30 women and 32 men). According to the results of the research: (1) There are no significant changes regarding the downward comparison scale in the memory task among low-scorers, by the impact of the recognition of the group data. (2) There are no significant correlations between the follower motivation scale and the upward comparison concerning the first survey, but there is one in the second. (3) We can see correlations among low-scorers between the follower motivational scale and social comparison in both of the surveys. On the basis of these results we can say, that if the follower motivational style characterizes someone more likely, that person would rather apply upward comparison and he or she would avoid the strategy of downward comparison. I explain the results of this study along the basic theories of school motivation and social comparison, and I also take into account the results of some former researches