COMPARACIÓN PAREADA DE LAS ALTERNATIVAS EN LOS SUBCRITERIOS

continue to influence thinking today. However, as we have also indi-cated in Chapter 1, contemporary motivational psychology is in a con-siderable state of flux with a number of parallel developments taking place and new directions emerging. In our review, therefore, we will also trace these developments and directions in relation to existing theoretical approaches and map current issues and perspectives which are pushing the boundaries of the cognitive approach.

2.1 Key cognitive theories and constructs of motivation

Cognitive theories of motivation focus on the instrumental role of mental structures, beliefs and information-processing mechanisms in

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shaping individual behaviour and action. Motivation is viewed as located within the individual, though naturally the individual’s cogni-tions and percepcogni-tions may be influenced by various social and envir-onmental factors. While the mediational role of mental processes in shaping motivation is common to all cognitive approaches, there has been considerable variation in the range of cognitive-mediational processes theorised to be of importance, thus giving rise to several dif-ferent cognitive models and constructs of motivation. The reason for such variation and selectivity is that, as noted in Chapter 1, much past research has been concerned with the challenge of reduction, that is, trying to distil a relatively small number of motivational factors that would subsume or mediate numerous other factors, thereby producing a theoretical (rather than descriptive) framework. Generally, such the-oretical frameworks can be represented schematically as parsimonious models expressing the relationships among a select number of vari-ables, as is the case with perhaps the most long-standing and influen-tial framework in cognitive motivational psychology, expressed in its simplest form as: expectancy× value = motivation (see Concept 2.1). We will begin this review by examining this important theoretical frame-work in detail.

Concept 2.1 Expectancy-value frameworks

According to the main principles of expectancy-value theories, motiv-ation to perform various tasks is the product of two key factors:

• the individual’s expectancy of success in a given task and the rewards that successful task performance will bring.

• the value the individual attaches to success on that task, including the value of the rewards and of the engagement in performing the task.

The greater the perceived likelihood of goal-attainment and the greater the incentive value of the goal, the higher the degree of the individual’s positive motivation. Conversely, it is unlikely that effort will be invested in a task if either factor is missing, that is, if the individual is convinced that he or she cannot succeed no matter how hard he or she tries, or if the task does not lead to valued outcomes.

2.1.1 Expectancy-value theories

Expectancy-value frameworks theorise that individuals’ motivated decisions to engage in particular tasks and their performance and persistence can

be explained by their expectations of how well they will do on the task and how much they value its achievement. Atkinson’s early classic model of achievement motivation integrated the constructs of need for achievement, expectancy and value into a comprehensive theory (see Concept 2.2), and initiated a strong tradition of expectancy-value the-ories of achievement motivation. Until the turn of the century, atten-tion within this tradiatten-tion focused predominantly on the expectancy (rather than task value) dimension of achievement motivation and, in particular, on the cognitive-mediational processes that determine expectancy.

Concept 2.2 Achievement motivation and need for achievement Atkinson’s achievement motivation theory (cf. Atkinson and Raynor, 1974) was the first comprehensive model of achievement motivation and dominated the field for decades. The theory was formulated within an expectancy-value framework since achievement behaviours were seen by Atkinson to be determined by expectancies of success and incentive values.

To these he also added two further components in his model:

1. Need for achievement: Individuals with a high need for achievement are interested in excellence for its own sake (rather than for the extrinsic rewards it can bring), tend to initiate achievement activities, work with heightened intensity at these tasks and persist in the face of fail-ure. This need becomes part of an individual’s personality and affects the person’s behaviour in every facet of life, including education.

2. Fear of failure: This is the opposite of need for achievement in that here the main drive to do well comes from avoiding a negative out-come rather than approaching a positive one.

Achievement motivation, then, was taken to be the sum of need for achievement, the probability of success and the incentive value of suc-cessful task fulfilment, minus the sum of fear of failure, the incentive to avoid failure and the probability of failure. That is, achievement-oriented behaviour was seen as the resultant of a conflict between approach and avoidance tendencies.

Expectancy of success

From an educational point of view, the key cognitive-mediational pro-cesses theorised to determine expectancy of success include:

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• processing one’s past experiences (attribution theory),

• judging one’s own abilities and competence (self-efficacy theory),

• attempting to maintain one’s self-esteem (self-worth theory).

Attributional processes form one of the most important influences on the formation of peoples’ expectancies, and their investigation was the dominant model in research on student motivation in the 1980s.

Attribution theory, based on the work of Bernard Weiner (e.g. 1992), is based on the assumption that people try to understand the causal determinants of their past successes and failures and that different types of causal attributions affect behaviour differently (see Concept 2.3).

Concept 2.3 The main principle of attribution theory

The main principle of attribution theory is that the causal attributions one makes of past successes and failures (i.e. inferences about why cer-tain outcomes have occurred) have consequences on future achievement strivings. As Graham (1994) summarises, the most common attributions in school environments are those to

• ability

• effort

• task difficulty

• luck

• mood

• family background

• help or hindrance from others.

Among these, ability and effort have been identified as the most domi-nant perceived causes in western culture. Past failure that is ascribed to stable and uncontrollable factors such as low ability (e.g. ‘I failed because I am too stupid’) hinders future achievement behaviour more than fail-ure that is ascribed to unstable and controllable factors (i.e. ones that the learner can change, such as effort; e.g. ‘I didn’t pass the test because I hadn’t prepared enough for it’).

As noted briefly in Chapter 1, attribution theory was also one of the few cognitive models of motivation to integrate emotions, in terms of the specific emotional consequences of particular causal attributions (Weiner, 1986). For example, attributing failure to an internal uncon-trollable factor such as lack of aptitude may trigger feelings of shame,

Quote 2.1 Bandura on self-efficacy beliefs

Efficacy beliefs are the foundation of human agency. Unless people believe that they can produce desired results and forestall detrimental ones by their actions, they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties. Whatever other factors may operate as guides and motivators, they are rooted in the core belief that one has the power to produce effects by one’s actions.

Bandura (2001: 10)

embarrassment or humiliation. On the other hand, attributing failure to an internal controllable factor such as lack of effort may evoke feel-ings of guilt. Most recently, mirroring the current growth of interest in emotion and moves towards more dynamic interactive perspectives on motivation, Weiner (2007) has focused attention on the attributional processes of others (teachers, peers) vis-à-vis a person’s performance, and their emotional consequences (e.g. sympathy, envy, admiration, anger), and how these interact with and affect the person’s own self-perceptions and motivation.

Self-efficacy theory has been developed by Albert Bandura and it refers to people’s judgement of their capabilities to carry out certain specific tasks and, accordingly, their sense of efficacy will determine choice of activities attempted, along with level of aspiration, amount of effort exerted and persistence displayed. People with a low sense of self-efficacy in a given domain perceive difficult tasks as personal threats;

they dwell on their own personal deficiencies and the obstacles they encounter rather than concentrate on how to perform the task success-fully. Consequently, they easily lose faith in their capabilities and are likely to give up. In contrast, a strong sense of self-efficacy enhances people’s achievement behaviour by helping them to approach threaten-ing situations with confidence, to maintain a task- rather than self-diagnostic focus during task involvement, and to heighten and sustain effort in the face of failure.

It is important to note that self-efficacy beliefs are only indirectly related to actual competence and abilities because they are the product of a complex process of self-persuasion that is based on cognitive processing of diverse sources (e.g. other people’s opinions, feedback, evaluation, encouragement or reinforcement; past experiences and

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training; observing peers; information about appropriate task strat-egies). Theoretically, the construct of self-efficacy is thus associated with social learning theory, developed by Bandura (1986) as social cognitive theory, which describes learning in terms of the interrelationships between personal, behavioural and environmental or social factors.

In his more recent writing, Bandura (e.g. 2001, 2004) extends the notion of self-efficacy to the collective efficacy of groups (e.g. families, communities, social institutions) working together towards a common goal, thus reflecting parallel moves in the field towards the analysis of motivation as a socially distributed process. We shall come back to this perspective later in the chapter.

According to Covington’s (1992) self-worth theory, people are highly motivated to maintain a fundamental sense of personal value and worth, especially in the face of competition, failure and negative feed-back. This basic need for self-worth generates a number of unique pat-terns of motivational beliefs and face-saving behaviours in school settings, particularly when potentially poor performance imposes a threat to the student’s self-esteem. In such situations students may actually stand to gain by not trying, that is, by deliberately withholding effort or engaging in self-handicapping or defensive strategies (Rhodewalt and Vohs, 2007), because this would allow failure to be attributed to lack of effort rather than to low ability (for similar L2-related phenomena, see Breen et al., 2001). An example of this is when a learner spends insufficient time preparing for a test so that in the case of failure he or she can use the lack of sufficient striving as a mitigating excuse for poor performance, rather than have to admit a lack of com-petence, which would be far more damaging for the student’s self-concept.

Self-worth theory highlights the critical importance of a person’s sense of ability or competence in shaping motivation in educational or other achievement settings. Perceived competence or ability is likewise a core feature of attributional processes and self-efficacy beliefs. Very recently, there has been a major push towards refocusing the achieve-ment motivation framework around the concept of ‘competence’, with the publication of 35 papers by leading achievement motivation researchers in a collected volume entitled Handbook of Competence and Motivation (Elliot and Dweck, 2007a). As Elliot and Dweck (2007b: 9) explain in their introduction to the volume, there are strong arguments for replacing the term ‘achievement motivation’ with ‘competence motivation’. Chief among these is the problem of establishing a clear conceptual definition of ‘achievement’, with the tendency to rely on a rather vague lay understanding of the term narrowly restricted to

Quote 2.2 Elliot and Dweck on the problem of defining

‘achievement’

In essence, what is commonly referred to as the ‘achievement motivation literature’ represents a rather loose compendium of theoretical and empirical work focused on a colloquial understanding of the term

‘achievement’. We suggest that for the achievement motivation literature to flourish, it is important to delineate its conceptual core carefully and precisely. We seek to do so by proposing that competence be considered the conceptual core of the achievement motivation literature.

Elliot and Dweck (2007b: 5)

individual accomplishment within the domains of school, sports and work. Elliot and Dweck state that, as a result, the achievement motiva-tion literature lacks conceptual rigour and at the same time remains somewhat isolated from other potentially relevant domains of enquiry such as creativity, social comparison and self-regulated learning. In contrast, they argue that the term ‘competence’ has a precise meaning, is a rich and profound psychological concept, is ubiquitous in daily life, has a substantial impact on emotion and well-being, and is operative across the lifespan and across cultural boundaries (Elliot and Dweck, 2007b: 6–8).

Task value

As noted earlier, most theorists using expectancy-value models have tended to focus on the expectancy component. The value component (also labelled as ‘valence’, ‘incentive value’, ‘attainment value’, ‘task value’ and ‘achievement task value’ by various researchers) has been less extensively theorised, with most of the work in this area attributable to two scholars in particular, Jacquelynne Eccles and Allan Wigfield (e.g.

Eccles, 2007; Wigfield and Eccles, 2000). They developed a compre-hensive model of task values, defining them in terms of four compon-ents (see also Brophy, 1999, for an education-specific discussion):

• attainment value, that is, the personal importance of mastering a skill and doing well on a task;

• intrinsic value, that is, interest in or aesthetic appreciation of the subject/skills in question, and enjoyment coming from performing the activity;

Quote 2.3 Brophy on an alternative conception of the value of learning

Neither intrinsic motivation concepts (fun, enjoyment), nor extrinsic motiv-ation concepts (perform specific behaviors in order to earn anticipated rewards), nor even relatively specific or focused forms of utility value concepts (major in biology and work hard to get good grades to ensure entrance into medical school) satisfactorily construe the potential benefits derivable from learning the most powerful ideas and important intellectual skills taught in school. These benefits of education are better described using terms such as enrichment, enablement, and empowerment.

Brophy (2008: 40)

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• extrinsic utility value, that is, awareness of how well a task relates to current and future goals and what role learning plays in improving the quality of one’s life or making one a better person;

• cost, that is, the negative value component, including factors such as expended effort and time, other actions that the planned action would exclude, and various emotional costs such as anxiety and fear of failure.

The overall achievement value of a task is made up of the interplay of these four components, and this value is believed to determine the strength of intensity of the behaviour. Recently, growing interest in the temporal dimension of motivation, and in particular future time per-spectives, has begun to emphasise the importance of the utility value of tasks – that is, the extent to which students are able to perceive a clear instrumental relationship between current academic tasks and the attainment of personally valued long-term goals (e.g. McInerney, 2004;

Miller and Brickman, 2004). This brings us to consider a major related area in motivational psychology revolving around goals and goal theories.

2.1.2 Goal theories

The cognitive concept of ‘goal’ has largely replaced earlier concepts of

‘needs’ or ‘drives’ as the factor providing the impetus for and direction of motivated action. During the past two decades, research attention has focused in particular on three key areas:

• goal-setting,

• goal-orientation,

• goal content and multiplicity.

Goal-setting theory

Locke and Latham’s (1990) goal-setting theory seeks to explain differ-ences in performance among individuals in terms of differdiffer-ences in goal attributes. There are three particularly important areas where goals may differ: specificity, difficulty and goal commitment. Goal-setting theory is compatible with expectancy-value theories (Section 2.1.1) in that commitment is seen to be enhanced when people believe that achiev-ing the goal is possible (cf. expectancy) and important (cf. task value).

Locke (1996) summarises the main findings of past research under five points:

1. The more difficult the goal, the greater the achievement.

2. The more specific or explicit the goal, the more precisely perfor-mance is regulated.

3. Goals that are both specific and difficult lead to the highest performance.

4. Commitment to goals is most critical when goals are specific and difficult (i.e. when goals are easy or vague it is not hard to get com-mitment because it does not require much dedication to reach easy goals, and vague goals can be easily redefined to accommodate low performance).

5. High commitment to goals is attained when (a) the individual is convinced that the goal is important; and (b) the individual is con-vinced that the goal is attainable (or that, at least, progress can be made towards it).

Although Locke and Latham’s theory was developed in the context of organisational and work settings, it has been applied to educational settings (e.g. Pintrich and Schunk, 2002: 165–169), with much emphasis on the role of proximal goal-setting (see Concept 2.4) in promoting self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and self-regulation of learning (Bandura and Schunk, 1981; see also Boekaerts et al., 2005; Schunk and Zimmerman, 2008). As noted earlier in relation to task value, more-over, there is now increasing interest in models of motivation that

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incorporate time perspectives – that is, individuals’ understanding of their psychological past, present and future (Kauffman and Husman, 2004). In particular, there is a growing body of theory that examines how people’s conceptions of the future (e.g. in terms of personal goals or visions of themselves) influence their motivation in the present, and shape the degree to which they perceive proximal goals as instru-mental to personally valued distal goals or indeed create proximal guides for courses of action that will lead to distal attainments (e.g.

Miller and Brickman, 2004; Simons et al. 2004). As we shall see later in Chapter 4, this role of visualising the future is a major dimension of current theories of language learning motivation.

Concept 2.4 Proximal versus distal goals

It is important to note that goals are not only outcomes to shoot for but also standards by which to evaluate one’s performance providing a definition of success. Thus, in the case of long-lasting, continuous activ-ities such as language learning where there is only a rather distal goal of task completion (i.e. mastering the L2), the setting of proximal subgoals (e.g. taking tests, passing exams, satisfying learning contracts) may have a powerful motivating function in that they mark progress and provide immediate incentive and feedback. Attainable proximal subgoals can also serve as an important vehicle in the development of the students’

self-efficacy.

Goal-orientation theory

Unlike goal-setting theory, which was originally applied to motivation in the workplace, goal-orientation theory was specially developed to explain children’s learning and performance in schools settings. As Ames (1992) summarises, the theory highlights two contrasting achievement goal constructs or orientations that students can adopt towards their academic work:

• mastery orientation, involving the pursuit of ‘mastery goals’ (also labelled as ‘task-involvement goals’ or ‘learning goals’) with the focus

• mastery orientation, involving the pursuit of ‘mastery goals’ (also labelled as ‘task-involvement goals’ or ‘learning goals’) with the focus