Autonomy support, personality, and mindset in predicting academic performance among early adolescents: The mediating role of self-determined motivation.

CITATION: Mammadov, S., & Tozoglu, D. (2023). Autonomy support, personality, and mindset in predicting academic performance among early adolescents: The mediating role of self-determined motivation. Psychology in the Schools, 60, 3754–3769. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.22966

This paper supports a tenet that is highly unsurprising: Young adolescents—that is, middle school students—who are very conscientious and who have high levels of autonomy support from teachers and parents show greater intrinsic motivation and as a result tend to do better academically. This research set out to determine not whether, but rather the degree to which these conditions are correlated with academic outcomes in middle schoolers.

Using Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory as a theoretical framework, the authors used a series of questions focused on the theory’s three basic needs: autonomy (desire to feel ownership over one’s actions, competence (desire to be good at something), and relatedness (desire to form and maintain strong bonds with others). Autonomy in particular is a predictor of academic success, and this paper cites numerous sources that indicate that students thrive academically and socially when their behaviors are autonomous rather than controlled.

The second part of the authors’ theoretical framework was the widely recognized Big Five, a personality taxonomy that suggests that five primary traits predict personality: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The first two have been strongly correlated with learning in innumerable studies, and as such, were appropriate choices for personality within this study.

The authors presented an 86-question Qualtrics survey to 234 middle school students from a public school district in the southeastern US; students were mostly white (58%), which reflects the distribution in that school district. The Likert-style survey asked a series of questions clustered around determining conscientiousness, openness, growth mindset, teacher autonomy support, parent autonomy support, and motivation. Survey results were compared against end-of-year cumulative grade point averages. Conscientiousness had the strongest correlation with academic performance, growth mindset a mild correlation, and the personality trait of “openness,” the weakest. One surprising result was the connection of controlled motivation with grades—that is, middle school students’ academic outcomes appeared connected to external motivators such as grades, recognition, perceived approach, or to avoid punishment or feelings of guilt. The most important and applicable finding was the “critical” importance [sic.] of autonomy support. Students who receive high degrees of autonomy support from teachers and parents tend to do better academically.

One limitation is the connection of conscientiousness, openness, and growth mindset (optimistic self-efficacy) as personality traits, rather than fluctuating emotional conditions. Ascribing these to “personality” suggests that they are immutable, and much research supports evidence to the contrary. Second, though the authors note correlations between the measured traits and conditions, they self-state that this study cannot confidently assert causality. A third limitation is that the personality indicators were all determined by self-report and thus potentially influenced by social desirability, but note that self-report survey is standard practice in qualitative assessment of personality traits and motivations for behavior.