Physical activity is critical to healthy development of children. It is well documented that helping children develop and sustain a physically active lifestyle requires children to become motivated. Many studies have been conducted in the past 2.5 decades on determinants and correlates for children and adolescents' physical activity…

Executive function (EF) skills are the attention-regulation skills that make it possible to sustain attention, keep goals and information in mind, refrain from responding immediately, resist distraction, tolerate frustration, consider the consequences of different behaviors, reflect on past experiences, and plan for the future. As EF research…

Neither expectancy (VIE) theory nor goal setting alone are effective determinants of individual effort and task performance. To test the combined ability of VIE and goal setting to predict effort and performance, 44 real estate agents and their managers completed questionnaires. Quarterly income goals predicted managers' ratings of agents' effort,…

In studies examining the impact of performance information on motivation, both feedback and goal setting have been found to improve performance. To explore the generalizability of E. A. Locke's (1968) theory of task motivation to groups, 180 male masters of business administration (MBA) students were randomly organized into 60 three-person groups.…

Recent research has refuted the behaviorist approach by establishing a relationship between emotion and behavior. The data collection procedure, however, has often involved an inferred emotional state from a hypothetical situation. As partial fulfillment of a class requirement, 60 college students were asked to perform two problem solving tasks…

Defines metacognition and describes the effects of incorporating metacognitive aspects into instructional design. Three types of knowledge--declarative, procedural, and conditional--are discussed as necessary components of metacognitive awareness, and positive effects on the learner in terms of motivation and performance are described. (Author/LRW)

Reports development as compared to age-related changes in maternal task instruction to children in their second year. Interactions of 12 mother-infant pairs involved with simple tasks were video-recorded bimonthly between the infants' 14th and 22nd month. Comparison revealed the superiority of the development-centered model of adaptation of…

Effects of goal setting and feedback on creative productivity (as measured by both creativity emphasis and quantity emphasis) of 54 subjects found that feedback improved creativity performance of subjects with creativity goals, creativity feedback was more valued than feedback relating to quantity goals, goal commitment was increased by feedback,…

A self-paced free recall task was employed to assess the effects of motivational and metacognitive influences on active processing and recall. A total of 81 fourth-graders were randomly assigned to one of four instructional conditions: strategy instructions plus process monitoring instructions; strategy instructions only; process monitoring…

Reanalysis of the data from a 1984 study on making and breaking problem-solving mental sets with 50 children found that gifted subjects who failed to initially form the set made the most errors of any group and were least likely to recognize their own errors. Results suggest that motivational reasons may underly this inferior performance by some…

The relationship between managerial social power and subordinate job performance has produced mixed empirical results. To investigate the relationship between employees' performance and their perception of managers' social power under favorable and unfavorable climate conditions, an average of 135 city government employees completed two series of…

This study directly tested the hypothesis that intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity and extrinsic motivation is detrimental. Chosen because they identified themselves as actively involved in creative writing, 72 young adults participated in individual laboratory sessions where they were asked to write two brief poems. Before writing the…

Explores, in two independent replications one year apart, the possiblility that (a) the actions of three-year-old children are guided and accompanied by self-evaluations and withdrawal, (b) that self-evaluations and withdrawal have a motivational function for persistence, and (c) that they are influenced by the mother's behavior when interacting…

Presents a study of task liking and intrinsic motivation using self-esteem, task label, and feedback analysis of variance. Reports that, for subjects with high self-esteem, feedback had strong impact on liking of a difficult task. Concludes that, for subjects with low self-esteem, feedback had strong impact on liking easy tasks. (DK)

The concept of Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) is containing multimedia or computer based instruction components that improves human performance by providing process simplification, performance information and decision support system. EPSS has become a hot topic for organizational development, human resources, performance technology,…