COLLEGE PARK, MD (March, 2015) The AERA Motivation in Education special interest group has awarded this year’s Paul Pintrich Memorial Award to PhD student Katherine Muenks of the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. Established in 2004 and based on a competitive review process, this award is bestowed to a graduate student who will present research at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting. Taking the form of a cash prize, the award defrays travel expenses to the conference.
Muenks’s research seeks to understand students’ reasoning about relationships between effort and ability in academic contexts. This reasoning is an important determinant of students’ ability judgments, which in turn influence motivation and academic performance. Her AERA presentation will look specifically at a qualitative difference in how students conceive an effort: whether it is task-elicited (driven by the demands of the task) or self-initiated (driven by students’ motivation to engage in the task). This environmental factor has not been examined in previous research.
Muenks conducted two studies that examined whether undergraduate students’ perceptions of the source of another student’s effort – whether it was task-elicited or self-initiated – influenced their evaluations of the person’s academic ability. When participants were given task-elicited cues that focused on how characters felt about the ease or difficulty of the task, they tended to endorse an inverse relation between effort and ability, evaluating characters’ abilities higher when they put forth less effort. In contrast, when they were given self-initiated cues that focused on characters’ motivation to complete the task, they tended to rate abilities higher as more effort was put forth.
In accepting the special interest group award, Muenks acknowledged the guidance of Professor Allan Wigfield and former HDQM Assistant Professor David Miele (now at Boston College).
Katherine Muenks is a student in HDQM’s PhD in Human Development program, specializing in Educational Psychology.
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