Motivation deficits or amotivation are common in high school and constitute a significant problem for both students and teachers. Amotivation is directly related to boredom, nonattendance, and low involvement. By conceptualizing amotivation as a multifaceted construct, Shen et al. (2009) validated an amotivation model and clarified four dimensions of amotivation: deficient ability beliefs, deficient effort beliefs, insufficient task values, and unappealing characteristics of tasks. Although motivational literature has shown gender and grade differences, no research has been conducted from the perspectives of amotivation. This study was designed to examine the influence of gender and grade on amotivation and its dimensions in high school physical education.
Method
Participants were 334 9th, 10th, and 11th grades (ages 14-18 yrs, 46.7% girls) who completed the measure of amotivation in physical education using a 16-item amotivation inventory (Shen et al., 2009). A two-way MANOVA was conducted to examine gender and grade differences.
Analysis/Results
Cronbach alphas coefficients indicated acceptable internal consistency with all amotivation dimensions above .85. The MANOVA showed significant main effects for gender: F (4, 325) = 7.66, p <.01, ©¯2 =.09; and grade level: F (8, 648) = 4.02, p <.01, ©¯2 =.05. The interaction effect was not significant. Comparing to boys, girls demonstrated higher amotivation due to deficient effort beliefs, insufficient task values, and unappealing characteristics of tasks. For both boys and girls, amotivation due to insufficient task values and unappealing characteristics of tasks increased over grade. Surprisingly, amotivation due to deficient ability beliefs was stable across genders and all grades, suggesting that ability beliefs might be established early on and are stable over time. By comparing magnitude of average scores of all amotivation dimensions, we found that amotivation due to insufficient task values and deficient effort beliefs were higher than amotivation due to deficient ability beliefs. Amotivation due to unappealing characteristics of tasks displayed the highest means of all amotivation dimensions for both genders.
Conclusions
A better understanding of the dimensionality of amotivation may facilitate the design and implementation of intervention programs for disengaged students. Low perceived ability or competence has long been considered to play a central role in motivation deficits in high school physical education. Yet the present results confirm that other cognitive and affective dimensions may be as important, perhaps even more so. The multifaceted nature of amotivation and its gender and grade level differences must be considered and instructionally addressed during teaching and learning.
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