There is limited and inconsistent evidence on whether absolute or relative standing feedback is more influential. Three experiments were conducted to compare the effects of absolute and relative standing feedback on self-evaluative and affective responses. College students completed math tests in a lab setting. They were randomly assigned to one…

In their situated expectancy-value theory, Eccles and Wigfield (2020) assume students' competence and value beliefs to be situation-specific and thereby to be "situative" in nature. Even though motivation research has gradually been developing an understanding of this situative nature, for instance, by disentangling time-consistent and…

This diary study provided the first classroom-based empirical test of the relations between student perceptions of high school science teachers' various autonomy supporting and thwarting practices and students' motivation and engagement on a daily basis over the course of an instructional unit. Perceived autonomy supporting practices were…

Although students' motivational frameworks (entity vs. incremental) have been linked to academic achievement, little is known about how early this link emerges and how motivational frameworks develop in the first place. In a year-long study (student N = 424, Teacher N = 58), we found that, as early as 1st and 2nd grade, children who endorsed an…

The present study examined teachers' domain-specific self-efficacy (TSE) in relation to individual students with a variety of social-emotional behaviors in class. Using a sample of 526 third- to sixth-grade students and 69 teachers, multilevel modeling was conducted to examine students' externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behaviors as…

Students (n = 797) from 36 4th-grade classrooms were taught the control of variables strategy for designing experiments. In the instruct condition, classes were taught in an interactive lecture format. In the manipulate condition, students worked in groups to design and run experiments to determine the effects of four variables. In the both…

The present study examined the capacity of 2 different theoretical models of motivation to explain why an externally provided rationale often supports students' motivation, engagement, and learning during relatively uninteresting learning activities. One hundred thirty-six undergraduates (108 women, 28 men) worked on an uninteresting 20-min lesson…

Dynamic assessment (DA) involves helping students learn a task and indexing responsiveness to that instruction as a measure of learning potential. The purpose of this study was to explore the utility of a DA of algebraic learning in predicting third graders' development of mathematics problem solving. In the fall, 122 third-grade students were…

High cognitive processing capacity (CPC) students were superior to low-CPC students in prose learning. Of the four learning modes--programmed instruction (PI), control, chunking study outline, and adjunct questions--PI was the most effective. Substantial CPC and performance correlations and poor long-term retention suggested that PI was not best…