TY - JOUR
T1 - Profiles of ability, effort, and difficulty
T2 - Relationships with worldviews, motivation and adjustment
AU - Malmberg, Lars Erik
AU - Little, Todd D.
N1 - Funding Information:
Parts of this work were supported by funding from the Finnish Academy to the first author, and grants from the NIH to the University of Kansas through the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (#5 P30 HD002528) and the Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders (#5 P30 DC005803).
PY - 2007/12
Y1 - 2007/12
N2 - Adopting a person-centered approach, we profiled 5th and 6th grade children's (152 boys and 161 girls) school-related beliefs about perceived task difficulty and agency beliefs in ability and effort. Five clusters were compared across key learning-related dimensions encompassing underlying worldviews (means-ends beliefs, normative difficulty, nature of ability), motivation (intrinsic, identified, introjected, and extrinsic), and adjustment (achievement and well-being): Agentic (high ability, high effort, low difficulty), Strivers (above average ability, high effort, high difficulty), Normative (average ability, effort and difficulty), Disengaged (low ability, low effort, average difficulty) and Challenged (low ability, low effort, high difficulty). The findings suggest that difficulty, perceived either as challenge or obstacle, plays an important role for the belief profiles, and that relationships with worldviews and motivation are indicative of adaptation and maladaptation.
AB - Adopting a person-centered approach, we profiled 5th and 6th grade children's (152 boys and 161 girls) school-related beliefs about perceived task difficulty and agency beliefs in ability and effort. Five clusters were compared across key learning-related dimensions encompassing underlying worldviews (means-ends beliefs, normative difficulty, nature of ability), motivation (intrinsic, identified, introjected, and extrinsic), and adjustment (achievement and well-being): Agentic (high ability, high effort, low difficulty), Strivers (above average ability, high effort, high difficulty), Normative (average ability, effort and difficulty), Disengaged (low ability, low effort, average difficulty) and Challenged (low ability, low effort, high difficulty). The findings suggest that difficulty, perceived either as challenge or obstacle, plays an important role for the belief profiles, and that relationships with worldviews and motivation are indicative of adaptation and maladaptation.
KW - Ability
KW - Adaptation
KW - Agency
KW - Difficulty
KW - Effort
KW - Motivation
KW - Person approach
KW - Worldview
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=36448976861&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2007.09.014
DO - 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2007.09.014
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:36448976861
VL - 17
SP - 739
EP - 754
JO - Learning and Instruction
JF - Learning and Instruction
SN - 0959-4752
IS - 6
ER -