The achievement flow motive as an element of the autotelic personality: predicting educational attainment in three cultures

Human behavior is directed by an implicit and an explicit motivational system. The intrinsic form of the implicit achievement motive has been demonstrated to predict the experience of flow. Thus, this achievement flow motive can be considered an integral component of the autotelic personality, posited in Flow Theory as dispositional difference in the propensity to experience flow. As implicit motivation predicts long-term behavioral trends and flow predicts quality of performance, the achievement flow motive should be predictive of a long-term goal pursuit such as educational attainment. This hypothesis is tested cross-culturally to shed some light on the universality of flow: Participants from Cameroon, Costa Rica, and Germany were asked about the level of education they attained. To assess their achievement flow motive, the Operant Motive Test was employed. After measurement equivalence was established, analyses revealed that, across all three cultures, the achievement flow motive explained variance in educational attainment independent of achievement values as measured by a scale of the Schwartz Value Survey. Consequently, as would be expected of an element of the autotelic personality, the achievement flow motive predicts long-term academic success.     

Interindividual Differences in Learning Performance: The Effects of Age,Intelligence, and Strategic Task Approach

ABSTRACT

The present study investigated fluid and crystallized intelligence as well as strategic task approaches as potential sources of age-related differences in adult learning performance. Therefore, 45 young and 45 old adults were asked to learn pictured objects. Overall, young participants outperformed old participants in this learning test. However, more than 2/3 of the interindividual variability in learning performance was explained by interindividual differences in fluid intelligence and strategic task approach, with age not being a reliable predictor. Results indicate that personal resources and task approach influence learning performance directly and independently.     

The impact of metamemory and domain-specific knowledge on memory performance

This paper consists of two major parts. First, research exploring possible interactions between metamemory and domain-specific knowledge in influencing children’s text recall and comprehension is briefly summarized. Overall, the findings indicate that metacognitive knowledge does make a difference even in cases where domain-specific knowledge is rich. Second, a recent experiment conducted in our lab and investigating the generalizability of this conclusion for sort-recall tasks is described in more detail. Third — and fourth-grade soccer experts and novices were first given a comprehensive metamemory questionnaire and then administered a sort-recall tasks using two different picture lists: whereas one list included items from various semantical categories (e.g., animals, clothes), the other list was composed of soccer pictures that could be classified in several categories such as players, kicks, or equipment. The results showed that although domain-specific knowledge had a strong impact on recall of the soccer list, general metacognitive knowledge made an independent contribution, particularly for the group of soccer experts. More specifically, good metamemory positively affected the recall of experts but had no impact on novices’ memory performance.     

Expertise reversal effects in writing-to-learn

This article presents two longitudinal studies that investigated expertise reversal effects in journal writing. In Experiment 1, students wrote regular journal entries over a whole term. The experimental group received a combination of cognitive and metacognitive prompts. The control group received no prompts. In the first half of the term, the experimental group applied more cognitive and metacognitive strategies in their journals and showed higher learning outcomes than the control group. Towards the end of the term, the amount of cognitive and metacognitive strategies elicited by the experimental group decreased while the number of cognitive strategies applied by the control group increased. Accordingly, the experimental group lost its superiority on learning outcomes. In order to avoid these negative long-term effects of prompts, a gradual and adaptive fading-out of the prompts was introduced in the experimental group in Experiment 2 while a control group received permanent prompts. The results showed that, over the course of the term, the fading group applied increasingly more cognitive strategies while the control group applied fewer and fewer cognitive strategies. Accordingly, at the end of the term, the permanent prompts group showed substantially lower learning outcomes than the fading group. Together, these results provide evidence for an expertise reversal effect in writing-to-learn. The more the students became skilled in journal writing and internalized the desired strategies, the more the external guidance by prompts became a redundant stimulus that interfered with the students’ internal tendency to apply the strategies and, thus, induced extraneous cognitive load. Accordingly, a gradual fading-out of the prompts in line with the learners’ growing competencies proved to be effective in mitigating the negative side-effects of the provided instructional support.