A social inequality of motivation? The relationship between beliefs about academic success and young people's educational attainment

Abstract

Meritocratic ideals, which emphasise individual responsibility and self-motivation, have featured prominently in discourses about Australia's international competitiveness in academic achievement. Young people are often encouraged to attribute academic success and failure to individual factors such as hard work and talent, and to downplay extrinsic factors such as luck, task difficulty, or broader structural advantages and disadvantages. Using longitudinal data on a large, single-age cohort (n=2,145) of young Australians participating in the Social Futures and Life Pathways ('Our Lives') project, we analyse the relationship between attributions for academic success across their final years of secondary schooling and how they related to educational attainment at the end of school. The belief that hard work would lead to academic success was widespread within the sample and positively associated with subsequent educational performance. Most students also emphasised the importance of having a supportive family, despite this being negatively associated with performance. Consistent with claims about a 'social inequality of motivation', the findings suggest that emphasising meritocracy may compound the disadvantages of young people from less educated or vocational backgrounds, and those living in rural and regional Australia, whilst impacting unevenly on males' and females' academic performance.

How students’ friendship network affects their GPA ranking

“…Existing studies have explored some important factors influencing student academic performance in general and GPA ranking in particular. These factors include, but are not limited to, study attitude (Vedel, 2014), level of study efforts (Smith, and Skrbiš, 2017), family background (Credé et al , 2017) and the student’s personality (Richardson et al , 2012), as we have mentioned in the first part of this paper. In fact, it is usually difficult to measure the above factors directly; instead, some related or alternative variables need to be selected for reflecting the above-mentioned aspects, as previously cited studies in Section 3 have done.…”

“…Intuitively, apart from the mentioned effects from students’ friendship network, we cannot ignore these traditional factors that significantly affect academic performance in general and GPA rankings in particular during our empirical analysis, such as the level of study effort (Smith and Skrbiš, 2017), student’s personality (Richardson et al , 2012), family background (Credé et al , 2017) and study attitude (Vedel, 2014). Although considering the control variables are not surprising in the empirical analysis, numerous existing studies with the aim of uncovering the network effects have not considered the potential control variables.…”

To What Factors do University Students Attribute Their Academic Success?

“…Based on these ideas, there are many researchers who have studied how these attributions work to explain the successfailure of students. Van Overwalle (1989), Batool and Akhter (2006), García (2006), Boruchovitch (2004), Kamal and Bener (2009), Lei (2009), Perry, Daniels, and Haynes (2008), Sucuoglu (2014), Smith and Skrbi (2017), and Munir (2020) who have explored attributions such as effort, difficulty of tasks, quality of teachers, attention, ability and luck, as determinants of academic success. All of them found that basically, effort and ability are the most frequently mentioned reasons as the reasons that lead to school success, and their main features are to be internal and controllable.…”

‘You come back fighting. That’s what gives you the drive to achieve’: The extraordinary psychological construction of the super-rich in entertainment documentaries

“…For example, it has been claimed that the top 1% of wealthy individuals have higher intelligence levels than the financially less well-off (Wai, 2014). This could be perceived to be reflective of a meritocratic environment where increased affluence is due to a person's traits as opposed to external factors such as their socio-economic status at birth (Smith and Skrbiš, 2017). The term 'meritocracy' was devised by Young (1958) as part of his satirical critique of the British educational system.…”