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Prima facie, the evidence from the current study suggests that because autonomous

motives were negatively associated with academic performance, teachers would be advised to lessen their students’ autonomous motives. However, there is little in the extant literature to suggest that this would be advisable. Instead, it seems more likely that in the current study the autonomous motives measure captured other aspects of the students’ beliefs, values, or behaviours which impacted grades and explained the negative relationship.

In Section 6.2.7, it was suggested that mastery goals are often pursued for au- tonomous reasons. It was also suggested that social desirability concerns, found to be associated with to mastery goals (and, it is argued, possibly autonomous motives too), may have encouraged some of the students to report the kinds of motives their teachers were believed to value. Dompnier, Darnon, and Butera (2009) have termed this as ‘faking it’. The question is: were some of the students who strongly endorsed autonomous motives also faking it? Were they reporting these motives because they believed their teachers valued them? If so, the focus of these students on external contingencies such as the good opinion of their teachers would seem to have been (paradoxically) detrimental to their performance. Connecting concern with external contingencies with impoverished academic performance has support in the relevant literature. In Black and Deci (2000) grade orientation, which measured the extent to which students focused on grades rather than learning, was negatively associated with grades. Similarly, a focus on extrinsic aspirations, and materialistic ones in par- ticular, was another external contingency that was found to be a negative predictor of academic performance (Ku, Dittmar, & Banerjee, 2012, 2014).

An alternative, but perhaps overlapping, explanation to why autonomous mo- tives and grades were negatively associated is the possibility that weaker ability students consistently endorsed autonomous motives because endorsing such motives avoided having to make normative, performance-related comparisons, ones which were likely to emphasise their relative incompetence relative to their peers. In other words, the choice of autonomous motives may have been a function of standards of competence and self-worth concerns (Covington, 2000).

7.1. Findings, implications, and agendas 173 A third possibility is that students were punished when they pursued the kind of learning associated with autonomous motives. Specifically, the testing environment did not reward the deep learning posited to be associated with autonomous motives (see Section 1.8).

The final possibility is that autonomous motives were endorsed by students who were more likely to study the course material that they found interesting and little else. As Senko and Miles (2008) suggested, such a divergence of students’ and teach- ers’ learning agendas can impact academic achievement. Their results also indicated that those pursuing this divergent learning agenda tended to pursue mastery goals. If mastery goals (in comparison to performance goals) tend to be more strongly as- sociated with a sense of choice and feelings of interest (Benita, Roth, & Deci, 2013), it is possible that those who strongly endorsed autonomous motives also pursued mastery goals and their own learning agendas, to the detriment of their grades. The implications for teaching

As indicated above, the relevant literature suggests teachers should try, as far as pos- sible, to provide autonomy support for their students. If autonomous motives were associated with a learning agenda that diverged from the teacher’s and negatively impacted grades, this raises the question of what can be done to encourage students to follow their interests and perform well. As Putwain and Remedios (2014) demon- strated, fear appeals; that is, appeals that reference the negative consequences of not doing what the teacher believes to be necessary for an up-coming, high-stakes exam tend to lower self-determined motivation and diminish performance if students appraise the teacher’s comments as a threat, which those with lower perceived com- petence tend to do. Conversely, if the teacher’s comments are appraised as a chal- lenge, which those with higher perceived competence tend to do, then achievement may be encouraged. Putwain, Remedios, and Symes (2015) caution that teachers need to be aware of the impact that their well-intended encouragements have on students.

7.1. Findings, implications, and agendas 174 A research agenda

A major assumption in the current study is that autonomous motives are generally adaptive and would normally be expected to offer students a grade-related perfor- mance advantage. Investigating further the reasons why the expected relationship between these motives and grades did not emerge is, consequently, of particular in- terest. Reassessing students motivational resources, but with the inclusion of instru- ments to measure mastery and performance goals (i.e., aims) and social desirability and utility concerns, would be an obvious research project.

If interest-based learning agendas were a factor in the negative relationship be- tween autonomous motives and grades, the extent to which such an approach to studying is prevalent or not and its relationship with autonomous motives and grades at the institution in the current study would need to be established as well as the means by which teachers acted (or not) to address the problem. If teachers use fear appeals to encourage students to study the subjects or parts of a course that the students are least interested in, these fear appeals could, in principle, be examined through an SDT-related lens. Specifically, teachers’ choice of examples of potential losses, which could be framed in either extrinsic (’you’ll lose marks’) or intrinsic (’you won’t achieve what you are capable of’) goal contents terms (Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004) or communicated in either controlling or autonomy- supportive language, could be used to classify fear appeals as either need-supportive or need-thwarting, acting to support or undermine students’ basic needs and aca- demic performance.