Changes in Achievement Motivation among University Freshmen

Abstract

Changes in achievement motivation over the first semester of university studies were examined with N = 229 freshmen, who were surveyed twice in the present study. Students' academic self-concepts, achievement goals, and subjective values were chosen as theoretically central components of achievement motivation. The results indicated significant deterioration in achievement motivation over the course of the first semester of university studies, a phenomenon which affected a large proportion of the first-year students. Regression analyses provided evidence that motivation, prior to the start of university studies, and the changes in motivation had incremental validity over measures of prior school-achievement in predicting self-regulated learning, performance in examinations, as well as the intention to change university majors or drop out completely (partially in interaction with prior school-achievement).

Is it still worth it? Applying expectancy-value theory to investigate the intraindividual motivational process of forming intentions to drop out from university

“…Yet, they found no consistent trend, but rather differences in the strength and valence of students' changes of expectancies and values (cf. Dresel and Grassinger 2013;Kosovich et al 2017;Robinson et al 2019). For some students, success expectation and the overall study value improved, or did not change at all.…”

“…Musu-Gillette et al 2015), and micro longitudinal studies that focused on steeper timely periods, such as over the course of one semester (cf. Dresel and Grassinger 2013). The finest timely granularity is reached by applying intensive longitudinal designs (e.g., experience sampling method; Csikszentmihalyi and Larson 2014;cf.…”

“…. Furthermore, according to Eccles (2005), a students' motivation is likely to be "shaped over time" (Eccles 2005, p. 106), and changes within students' motivation interact with dropout intention (Dresel and Grassinger 2013;Ghassemi et al 2017). Notably, only few studies have investigated the association between motivation and dropout intention on an intraindividual level, and used intraindividual changes in motivation explicitly as a predictor of academic outcomes with respect to dropout intention.…”

“…In most studies, students' prior achievement-in terms of grade point average (GPA)-was consistently used as a control variable (cf. Dresel and Grassinger 2013;Perez et al 2014) because students with poorer grades were found to have higher dropout intention. Concerning the motivational reasons, Heublein et al (2017) discovered that motivation was of higher relevance for early dropouts, and of higher importance for study dropout from humanities rather than STEM fields.…”

“…Such a decrease is associated with a higher intention to drop out from university (cf. Dresel and Grassinger 2013). Most of the contemporary studies were conducted as field research, and addressed questions of interindividual differences to explain dropout phenomena.…”