| Description |
Students experience fluctuations in their motivation over time, including deficits in motivation. How students respond to motivation problems has consequences for their future persistence and performance in school. Therefore, it is important to understand how students reason about motivation problems when they arise. In this research, we focus on the attributions college students make about another student's motivational problem. Specifically, we take a person-centered analytic approach to explore the following: a) whether there are distinct subgroups of students who explain motivation problems using similar types of attributions, and b) whether characteristics of perceivers and/or targets are associated with classification into these subgroups. College students (N=1,315) participated in two experimental studies in which they were asked to make judgments about an advanced high school student who was struggling to get motivated in school. In Study 1, the struggling student was either male or female, and struggling in either a history or physics course. In Study 2, the struggling student was always the same gender as the participant, but was either White, Asian, or Latinx, again struggling in either a history or a physics course. Participants rated the extent to which lack of ability, effort, interest, and value explained the student's motivation problem. Latent Profile Analysis revealed three distinct subgroups of respondents: an "effort" subgroup who used primarily effort attributions, an "interest-value-effort" subgroup who used interest, value, and effort attributions simultaneously, and an "ability-interest-value-effort" subgroup who used all four types of attributions simultaneously. Characteristics of perceivers (e.g., implicit theories about interest) and targets (e.g., gender and race) were associated with the likelihood that participants were classified into each of these subgroups. This research has implications for our understanding of student-level and contextual factors that affect how students think about motivation problems. |
