A motivação escolar de alunos com baixo rendimento acadêmico: metas de realização, atribuições de causalidade e autoconceito

Abstract

In Brazil, many data indicate the school difficulties found by the students, mainly in the public teaching. The analysis of the factors motivacionais has shown a promising alternative for the understanding of the low academic achievement. The motivation can be understood as a variety of psychological processes that lead to a choice, stimulate and begin a behavior directed toward an objective, which guarantee the permanence in the same. The recent researches has been focusing the effects mediators in the motivation of the students' beliefs related to the own capacity to accomplish the school activities (beliefs about self-efficacy and self-concept) and the reasons and the students' purposes to engage in academic activities (the attributions and self-control beliefs, levels of interest and intrinsic motivation, values and achievement goals). The present study focused the students’ achievement goals, causality attributions and self-concept. The main achievement goals are learning and performance: the first has been associated to positive cognitive, motivational, affective and behavioral outcomes, and performance goal has been linked to less adaptive outcomes. In the same way the effects in the motivation of the attributions (individual's perceptions on the causes of his successes and failures) and of the self-concept (set of representations that the person has of itself) has been studied. An adaptive attributional pattern is that in which the success is related to the ability and effort and the failure attributed to the lack of effort. Related to self-concept, student that develops a positive perception of his academic ability has high expectations for his performance and shows a larger cognitive engagement in the academic tasks. The literature evidences that students with low academic performance less adaptive motivational patterns, which can have a severe impact in the performance behaviors, affecting their learning. In order to offer a contribution for the understanding of the low academic performance in the Brazilian context, the present study had as objectives: the) to compare the achievement goals, attributions and self-concept of students in 6th and 7th grades with acting low, medium and high performance in Portuguese; b) to identify the relations among the academic performance and these three variables and c) to identify how these motivational variable are linked. Participated in the study 42 students with low academic performance, 65 students with medium academic performance and 52 with high academic performance, between 12 and 15 years, studying in a public school. The instruments used were: Scale of Personal Goals of the Students, Scale of Attribution of Causality for Activities of Reading and Writing of Texts and the academic scales of SDQ-II (Self-Description Questionnaire). For the analysis of the data ANOVA test and the Pearson Correlation were accomplished (p <0,05). Differences were found among the group with low academic in Portuguese and with high academic performance related to the learning goal, attribution for the success to the capacity, effort and external causes, attribution of the failure to the capacity and general school, Portuguese and Mathematics self-concept. The academic performance of the students presented as positively correlated to the learning goal, to the attribution of the success to the capacith and the effort and to the three areas of the self-concept, negatively correlated negatively to the attribution of the success to external cause and of the failure to the capacity. The results of the present study corroborate the discoveries of the literature, once the characteristics motivacional characteristics were less adaptive among students with low performance and more adaptative among students with high performance. This research has given a group of data on some motivational characteristics, which were considered relevant once they were obtained through widely used instruments in recent international researches, offering methodological contributions and results that can be reference for subsequent studies.