Relationships Between Three Types of Perceived Competence and Motivational Outcomes

Background/Purpose: How children evaluate their competence (referred to as perceived competence; PC) is essential to their participation, performance and learning. Children generally use task mastery, personal improvement, or superior performance over others to evaluate their competence in physical education/physical activity settings. Accordingly, perceived competence is multidimensional and includes: PC-mastery, PC-self and PC-other (e.g., Spray & Warburton, 2011). Little is known about differential roles of the three types of perceived competence in predicting children’s motivational outcomes in physical activity settings. Thus, this study examined whether PC-mastery, PC-self and PC-other played different predictive roles on motivational outcomes, including the Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run (PACER) test scores, self-efficacy and prosocial behaviors in a summer sports camp.

Method: The setting was a 3-week summer sports camp located at the Southwestern U.S. Participants were 79 boys aged 10-14 years (M age = 11.91, SD = 1.21) including 50.6% Hispanic-American, 25.3% Caucasian-American, 20.3% African-American and 3.8% others. They completed a battery of questionnaires adapted from research literatures (e.g., Guan, Xiang, McBride, & Bruene, 2006; Spray & Warburton, 2011) assessing their perceived competence, prosocial behaviors, and self-efficacy. They also finished the 20-meter PACER test.

Analysis/Results: Multiple regression analyses revealed that the three types of perceived competence collectively accounted for 17% of variance in PACER test (F(3, 76) = 5.36, p < .01), 31% in self-efficacy (F(3, 76) = 11.58, p < .001), and 13% in prosocial behaviors (F(3, 76) = 3.72, p < .05). PC-other (β = .38, t = 3.46, p < .01) positively predicted PACER test scores. PC- mastery (β = .34, t = 2.90, p < .01) positively predicted prosocial behaviors. PC-mastery (β = .21, t = 2.02, p < .05), PC-self (β = .31, t = 2.80, p < .01), and PC-other (β = .25, t = 2.47, p < .05) all significantly positively predicted self-efficacy. 

Conclusions: That PC-other predicted PACER test score, PC-master predicted prosocial behaviors, but PC-self was the most important predictor of self-efficacy. This result indicate that each of these three perceived competences have unique predictive powers on different motivational outcomes. This study provides initial evidence that all three types of perceived competences predicted boys’ motivational outcomes and played different roles respectively. Summer sports camp counselors should be aware of these findings and help boys developing the three types of perceived competences effectively.