Self-determination theory posits, through an organismic perspective of human development, that all humans are inherently curious to assimilate new information and all naturally behave for their psychological growth. Central to this natural tendency is the determinant role of the social environment in maintaining or hindering this inherent function of the self. Humans thus develop, through their life, motivational patterns that can be characterized as being either internalized or not. For SDT, this natural process of integrating one’s motives, values, and belief in the self can be observed through the internalization continuum of self-determination. The self-determination continuum describes the behavioral regulation of individuals and can be broke down in two large dimensions: autonomous vs controlled motivation. When applied to the educational context, the theory would say that students who invest themselves in their academic activities for more internalized and autonomous reasons will be more likely to experience positive educational outcomes (e.g., achievement, perseverance, deeper learning, well-being, and lower dropout intentions). However, recent meta-analyses revealed a small positive association between explicit self-evaluation of autonomous motivation (AM) and academic achievement (r ≈ .177; Cerasoli, Nicklin, & Ford, 2014; Richardson, Abraham, & Bond, 2012; Taylor et al., 2014). In those studies, the internalization dimensions have been mainly measured through self-report methodology, and even if those measures are valid and reliable they should only be interpreted as the accessible declared self-knowledge one individual has about his own motivational dispositions. As such, this thesis embarks on the premise that those explicit self-evaluations mainly tap into the reflective/conscious side on the human brain and that taking a dual-process perspective over the integration process could alleviate our understanding of human motivation. This thesis also acknowledges, as in most dual-process theories, the determinant role of working memory capacity (WMC) in the interplay between the explicit/reflective/controlled and implicit/impulsive/automatic processes. The ability to control and direct attention, as measured by WMC, is an important individual differences that can explain why some dual-process effect might be working for some individuals but not for the other (Barrett, Tugade, & Engle, 2004). In this dissertation, my hypotheses were anchored in SDT and inspired by the implicit social cognition approach. Accordingly, I aimed at exploring the internalization process of university students in the educational context. To that end, I proposed three original studies described in three different articles. In Article 1, I first developed a lexical decision task of implicit AM based on the preliminary work of Burton, Lydon, D'Alessandro, and Koestner (2006). I hypothesized that explicit and implicit AM should interact in a synergistic manner in the prediction of subsequent academic achievement. Moreover, this synergistic effect should depend on the WMC of the students, as the integrative process is likely to be cognitively challenging. A sample of 272 university students were recruited and participated in a lab study (INSPIRE lab). Results of moderated regression analysis revealed that explicit AM was a significant predictor of semester GPA, but only for students with high level of implicit AM, and average to high levels of WMC. This prediction was double the size of past meta-analyses estimate (β = .445), thus demonstrating that incorporating a dual-process perspective of AM enable a more precise account of internalization. In Article 2, I extended the lexical decision task with additional stimuli, replicated the effect of Article 1 with Bayesian estimation and tested a reciprocal hypothesis between academic AM and achievement. I hypothesized that the past academic achievements of students are likely to influence the development of AM for university studies. Again in the INSPIRE lab, 258 undergraduate students participated in this study. Results of a mediational model revealed a significant reciprocal effect of past academic achievement, explicit AM and subsequent academic achievement at university. Moreover, results from study 1 were included as informative prior in the Bayesian analysis of study 2. A moderated-moderation mediation model was tested and revealed a significant synergistic effect between explicit and implicit AM, thus replicating the effect found in study 1. This effect was also moderated by WMC, once again replicating the results of study 1, by demonstrating that sufficient WMC is needed for the synergistic effect of AM to be operant. Lastly, in Article 3 I developed an in-lab learning situation to evaluate if dispositions of AM could be activated outside of the students’ awareness and enable explicitly declared AM to be predictive of subsequent learning performance (math and verbal components). The beneficial effect of explicit AM on subsequent learning performance was only observed for the students who were subliminally primed with AM words. This experimental study thus stressed on the importance of the environment in shaping individuals’ behavior, even when that environment is unconsciously perceived. The findings of this experimental study were thus repositioned in a person x environment interpretation, as opposed to study 1 and 2 which were framed in a person x person interpretation. Of particular interest, contrary to studies 1 and 2, only students with low to average levels of WMC seemed to benefit from the situational priming of AM words. Students with lower levels of WMC can thus benefit from implicit situational cues of AM, as the results demonstrate that it can activate the synergistic effect of AM and ultimately help them perform better on the exam. Overall, this thesis has provided empirical evidence for adopting a dual-process perspective of AM combining motivation and cognitive research in the prediction of academic achievement.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/38587 |
| Date | 18 December 2018 |
| Creators | Gareau, Alexandre |
| Contributors | Gaudreau, Patrick |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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