Representing a transitional stage during which the school destinies are determinated, the middle school years are a critical time for students. Mobilizing adaptation , commitment and decision-making capabilities , this stage of schooling seems to condition their future. The negative consequences of the transition from elementary to middle school has been the subject of particular attention in the educational literature.
More specifically, it is during this period that would begin a decline in academic motivation (eg, Anderman & Maehr , 1994). Indeed, for over three decades, motivation has been considered a crucial factor in explaining school learning. Among the types of motivation proposed by self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985, 2002), intrinsic motivation plays a particularly important role in academic achievement. Defined as engagement in an activity for the pleasure and satisfaction experienced by learning, intrinsic motivation is associated with high levels of academic achievement (Elliot & Dweck, 2005 ; ). Thus, numerous studies have reported that, from childhood through adolescence, students showing the highest levels of intrinsic motivation perform best at school, hold the most positive self-perceptions and display the least anxiety at school (Gottfried et al., 2005). Although these relations have been observed for all subject areas, they are particularly significant for math (e.g. Gottfried & Gottfried, 2004; Uguroglu & Walberg, 1979). Concurrently, numerous researchers have pointed out a motivational decline which begins as childhood end and continues throughout adolescence (Gottfried, Fleming & Gottfried, 2001 ; Gottfried, Marcoulides, Gottfried, & Oliver,, 2013 ; Harter, 1981; Lepper & Henderlong, 2000; Spinath & Spinath, 2005 ) with, once again, a particularly striking decline in the math domain.
The study to be presented was conducted on a panel of 1082 students which was followed from the beginning to the end of middle school years. During this period, students completed a questionnaire nine times what allowed us to include this work in a longitudinal approach aiming at accounting for the evolutionary nature of motivational process . Three main objectives have been covered:
Describing the evolution of motivation. Our goal will be to specify the shape of growth in a truly dynamic perspective.
Showing the interest of multilevel growth models in the modeling of change over time ( Bressoux , 2008). We'll see how this statistical modeling technique rarely used in eudcational science provides a more detailed understanding of the dynamic processes that influence learning and thus extend the research questions in education
Analyzing the variance decomposition of motivational processes in order to better determine the levels of analysis to investigate as part of a search for factors (individual, contextual, or both?) explaining the heterogeneity of evolutionary patterns of motivation.