Identifying reciprocities in school motivation research: A review of issues and solutions associated with cross-lagged effects models

• Autores: Fernando Núñez Regueiro, Jacques Juhel, Pascal Bressoux, Cécile Nurra
• Localización: Journal of educational psychology, ISSN-e 1939-2176, ISSN 0022-0663, Vol. 114, Nº. 5, 2022, págs. 945-965
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Part of the evidence used to corroborate school motivation theories relies on modeling methods that estimate cross-lagged effects between constructs, that is, reciprocal effects from one occasion to another. Yet, the reliability of cross-lagged models rests on the assumption that students do not differ in their trajectories of growth over time (e.g., no high- or low-achievers). The present review explains why deviations from this assumption produce unreliable findings by confounding between- and within-person processes of change. To relax this assumption, next-generation cross-lagged models are presented and illustrated using panel data on high school students (N = 944). These issues and solutions are discussed using, as a case study, the pervading theory that motivation develops as a function of reciprocal effects between beliefs about the self (e.g., academic self-concept) and school achievement. Implications regarding the use of cross-lagged models and knowledge building in school motivation research are discussed. Online supplementary materials containing technical notes on cross-lagged models, as well as open-source data and scripts for R and Mplus, are provided to aid educational researchers use and compare these alternative models. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: Current school motivation theories generally agree that students’ academic self-beliefs (e.g., feelings of competency or efficacy as a student) and school performance (e.g., grade point average, learning acquisitions) reinforce each other over time, meaning that experiencing positive developments on one dimension causes positive developments on the other dimension as well. However, the evidence upon which this conclusion has been reached in the literature relies on conventional modeling techniques that are prone to confound changes between individuals (i.e., how students differ on these dimensions over time, relative to one another) and changes within individuals (i.e., how students evolve on these dimensions over time, relative to themselves). In this article, we explain under which conditions this confounding can lead to erroneous claims about reciprocal influences, and how novel modeling techniques can fix this issue and produce more reliable evidence. Based on a literature review and on original data, evidence is reported that the above theoretical claim (i.e., that academic self-perceptions and school performance positively influence each other) is vulnerable to such confounding and does not stand to the scrutiny of novel modeling techniques. Complementary research might therefore be conducted to investigate this issue further and uncover novel findings concerning processes of change in student motivation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)