Achievement Motivation

Highly competent children often do not display patterns of achievement motivation (Phillips, 1987). Research has shown that a child’s perception of his or her competence is a better indicator of achievement motivation than the reality of his or her ability. (Bandura, 1977; Covington, 1984; Nicholls, 1982, Weiner, 1979). Not only does the child influence his achievement motivation but teachers and parents have a significant impact and influence on how the child views his or her abilities.

Research illustrating this theory of perception on achievement motivation has focused on highly skilled children who perceive their abilities as less than they are. Self-perception shows itself in factors of underachievement, low standards and learned helplessness. These children, although highly skilled, generally underachieve, hold themselves to lower standards and exhibit forms of learned helplessness because they see their abilities lower than what they actually are. Measelle, Ablow, & Cowan found that math and reading scores were related to the child’s perception of their academic competence, showing underachievement in these talented children (1998). In addition, these children often have a self-protective strategy in which they have high standards of what they think they should be doing, but perceive their ability to be low and therefore choose less challenging tasks than their ability level would indicate and in so doing lower their expectations of what they can reasonable achieve. (Phillips, 1984; Harter, 1983). Also, John Weisz studied children’s learned helplessness and discovered that when children perceive their skills negatively they will attribute their success to effort or luck rather than skill. (1979, 1981; Phillips, 1984).

Not only do children’s perceptions of themselves influence achievement motivation, but teachers and parents, specifically mothers, have a considerable influence on a child’s perception and motivation. A 1984 study found that children’s self-reports and ratings by teachers or mothers are at least as strong in correlation as the ratings between teachers and mothers. (Phillips). These findings begin to suggest that teachers and mothers have a powerful impact on their child’s perception of their ability.

Phillips findings also show that students who hold themselves to low standards, their teachers also hold them to low standards, indicating a reciprocal relationship (1984). The question that remains is: do the perceptions of the student influence the teachers’ perceptions or vise versa? A 2001 study indicates that the influence goes both ways. They found that “high and average self-concept students could not maintain confident self-concepts when their perceptions differed substantially from their teachers perceptions.” (Madon, 2001). They also found that changes in student self-concept could be predicted by teacher perceptions at the beginning of the school year. In contrast, she also found “targets [student], may continue to influence perceivers [teacher] over the entire course of their relationship, thus ultimately having greater influence in the long run.” (Madon, 2001).

The research on parents, with specific focus on mothers is fairly straightforward. The parents’ perception of children’s ability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The parents perceive their child’s ability; the children perceive their parents’ belief about them through appraisal which therefore can predict the child’s self-perception of his own competence. “Parents’ achievement beliefs for their children and children’s perceptions of these beliefs are strongly associated with the children’s self-perceptions of competence...” (Phillips, 1987). Children however, must accurately perceive their parent’s views about themselves.

In conclusion, children’s achievement motivation can be predicted by self-perception of ability. A number of