What is it about?
It has been assumed that high motivational drive for goal achievement contribute to high and improving academic achievement over time. In this article, however, we found that elementary school children with strong drive were in risk of having a low, and decreasing academic trajectory. High drive may reflect a strong motivation to achieve goals, but in elementary school children may have an array of personal interests and internal goals that are not aligned with the demands of the educational setting, such as excelling in play or gaining peer acceptance. In such cases drive may become detrimental to academic development. Accordingly, children with high drive may need different educational support strategies than children with other temperamental dispositions.
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Why is it important?
Schools and educators should be made aware that children who differ in their temperamental dispositions related to reward- or punishment sensitivity may need different educational support strategies to achieve academic success. Children who are motivated to avoid failure may need help to detach from intrusive thoughts and goal-related worries and could benefit from classrooms that reduce cues that signal performance focus. On the other hand, children with high motivational drive may need support in self-regulation or positive support in directing their motivational goals toward academic achievement.
Perspectives
It is fairly well established that children who are highly motivated to avoid failure may experience negative academic development. Intrusive thoughts and worries about performing badly can make it difficult to engage in skill developing activities. Also fear of failure can motivate student to hide their difficulties making it difficult for teachers to help them. However, high motivation to achieve goals and seek rewards have been assumed to be factors that predict academic success. The fact that we in this article assessed drive and reward responsiveness separately, made it possible to add nuance to this assumption. It may be that reward responsiveness contributes to regulating the drive to achieve goals by aligning behavior according to the available rewards in any given setting. Thus, if children lack the motivation to obtain available rewards such as good grades or praise from teachers, this could also increase the risk for pursuing other internal goals or interests that are not academically related, and high motivational drive can end up being detrimental to academic development. This may be a bigger challenge for elementary school students as older students have the ability to develop a larger array of effective self-regulatory strategies for achieving long-term goals.
Andreas Høstmælingen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Individual differences in students’ approach and avoidance sensitivity as predictors of academic progression during elementary school., Journal of Educational Psychology, April 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/edu0000947.
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