Evaluative Discourse and Achievement Motivation: Students' Perceptions and Theories

Abstract

Schools are places where students and teachers alike are immersed in an ongoing evaluative discourse. Obligatory participants in this discourse throughout the length of their schooling, students internalise, reconstruct, and reproduce school's evaluative gaze. This study traced four Canadian Grade 10 students' descriptions and interpretations of evaluative discourse in their junior high school, especially focusing on the use of effort and ability attributions to explain successes and failures. Each student participated individually in five semi-structured interviews with the researcher that were audiotaped, then transcribed and coded exhaustively for descriptors of effort, ability, and performance. In a sixth session, each student inductively sorted the descriptors he/she had used into categories,and explainedthe rationale for this arrangement. Thus, each student created an elaborated conceptual map of his/her perceptions of evaluative terminology used by him/herself, peers, and teachers across a range of school situations. These meta-maps provide individualised profiles of four students' conceptions of school evaluative language and how it relates to their own and peers' achievement motivation, thus contextualising and providing support for attribution theory. Examined across the four students, the meta-maps present an insight into a particular school's accepted discourse, its subtexts and social implications, and the relationships between evaluative language and motivation for school learning.