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On students’ metamotivational knowledge of self-determination

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Abstract

Metamotivational knowledge is a burgeoning area of study. It refers to people’s knowledge about motivation, and it has been shown to contribute to motivation and behavioral outcomes. The current study bridges metamotivational knowledge with self-determination theory (SDT), one of the most prominent theories of academic motivation. SDT proposes self-determination as a critical aspect of academic motivation. The current study thus answers two questions: What do students know about self-determination in academic motivation, and how does this knowledge predict outcomes? Two studies with college student samples from diverse cultures (American and Chinese) seek to answer these questions. The results show that students generally believe self-determined types of motivation to be more normative, more effective for performance and more beneficial for well-being than non-self-determined types. This is generally accurate, with some exceptions (e.g., the tendency to underestimate the relative normalcy of certain types of self-determined motivation). Path analyses support the hypothesized mediation model, such that believing self-determined academic motivation to be more normative and associated with better outcomes in performance and well-being, on average, predicts students' higher performance and well-being via the mediation of self-determined academic motivation. The effects of the metamotivational knowledge of self-determination hold after controlling for needs support and satisfaction processes, supporting metamotivational knowledge as an intraindividual resource for academic self-determination. In general, the mediation effects hold for both cultures, and similarities and dissimilarities from cross-cultural comparisons of metamotivational knowledge are also interpreted. The current research paves the way for metamotivational knowledge interventions aiming to improve student self-determination.

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Notes

  1. Technically, these four types are motivation regulations. For brevity and to avoid confusion with the concept of the self-regulation of motivation, the current paper may also refer to them as the four types of motivations.

  2. A reader familiar with SDT may wonder about integrated regulation and amotivation, which are also part of the more comprehensive version of the continuum (e.g., Ryan & Deci, 2017). The current study does not include these two types. Integrated regulation is not included because it has not received solid empirical support for its place in the continuum, and the current measurements do not appear to adequately operationalize it (e.g., Howard et al., 2017). Amotivation is not studied because strictly speaking, it is the absence of motivation rather than a type of motivation. Furthermore, because every individual arguably knows that lacking motivation is a negative state, and arguably nobody self-regulates their motivation to be nonmotivated, the research questions related to metamotivation have little relevance to amotivation. The four types that are included in the current research constitute a continuum in its own right, which is supported by previous research (e.g., Sheldon & Elliot, 1999; Sheldon et al., 2004).

  3. We also ran mediation models that include the three components of metamotivational knowledge as predictors. These results are not presented here, for the following reasons: (1) The three predictors are correlated, in some cases suppressing each other’s coefficients, making it difficult to interpret the results; (2) the patterns of results are generally reflected in the average metamotivational knowledge results shown in Table 2. As suggested by a reviewer, the paper is already long, and thus it would be beneficial to reduce details that contribute little. Interested readers are welcome to email the first author to obtain the results associated with the separate components of metamotivational knowledge.

  4. These comparisons have strong limitations, and hence need to be interpreted with caution. For example, measurement invariance was not established between cultures (given that it is not possible with single-item observed measures), and the comparisons are based on an assumption of zero measurement error. Because of these substantial assumptions and subjective interpretations, these comparisons are reported in Discussion rather than Results.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Johnmarshall Reeve for providing comments to a draft of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

    Shi Yu

  2. Shanghai Polytechnic University, Shanghai, China

    Fengjiao Zhang

  3. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Ludmila D. Nunes

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  1. Shi Yu
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  2. Fengjiao Zhang
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  3. Ludmila D. Nunes
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Contributions

Shi Yu: Designed the study, coordinated the study, conducted the data analyses, wrote the paper.

Fengjiao Zhang: Collected the Chinese data, and helped with design of study.

Ludmila D Nunes: Collected the American data, and helped with manuscript writing.

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Correspondence to Shi Yu.

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Yu, S., Zhang, F. & Nunes, L.D. On students’ metamotivational knowledge of self-determination. Metacognition Learning 18, 81–111 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-022-09318-7

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