Academic Motivation and School Attainment

Abstract

A twenty-four item self-rating inventory was constructed to assess academic motivation. Scores on the inventory were compared with teachers' ratings to give evidence of concurrent validity. A test-retest reliability coefficient of + 0 4 3 was obtained with an interval of 2; months. The inventory was given to 2,707 Aberdeen 13-year-olds who had previously been given various intellectual tests. School attainment was measured from teachers' estimates scaled against a verbal reasoning test. The scores on the inventory were found to correlate more closely with school attainment than with reasoning ability. Academic motivation scores also distinguished between groups of children who had improved their academic performance after transfer and those who had deteriorated. This distinction could not be attributed simply to social class differences. Even within social class, ' improvers ' had significantly higher scores on the inventory than ' deteriorators ' which suggests that ' academic motivation ' is not closely related to social class.

Motivation to learn: Conceptualisations and practicalities

“…Scores from such inventories were found not only to correlate quite highly with school and university achievement, but they also added to the prediction of attainment, beyond what ability measures alone could provide. 6 Combining estimates of motivation and study methods with inventory scores of personality, it was possible to describe differing ways of studying in terms of four contrasting groups of students. 7 One group was intrinsically motivated by what they were learning, being independent-minded and having wide-ranging academic interests.…”

Colour of Tester Effects on Children's Expressed Attitudes

“…The Aberdeen Academic Motivation Inventory (Entwistle, 1968), comprising a series of 24 items which subjects respond to in a 'Yes'-'No' response format. Two different types of sociometric measures, a peer nomination method and a roster and rating method, and finally a structured measure of stereotypes.…”

Education and the Social Psychology of Time

“…Criminologists and students of the sociology of work, for instance, have been concerned to identify sub-cultural groupings much more restricted than whole social classes; some educationists have brought attention to important variations of values and attitudes within a social class (Swift, 1967;Entwistle, 1968); and with the concept of "under-the-roof culture" individual families may become the focus of attention (Sprott, 1954).…”