Affect and motivation within and between school subjects : development and validation of an integrative structural model of academic self-concept, interest, and anxiety

Abstract

A comprehensive model of affect and motivation is necessary for disentangling the variance of subject-specific measures into components that are (a) construct-specific and generalize across different subjects, (b) subject-specific and common to different constructs, and (c) specific to a particular construct in a particular subject. In the present study, we developed and investigated an integrative model that yields new insights concerning the generality and school-subject-specificity of affective-motivational constructs. To this end, we first examined structural models that could account for the hierarchical and subject-specific nature of academic self-concept, anxiety, and interest, respectively. In a second step, we combined these construct-specific models to investigate an integrative model that was able to simultaneously address between- and within-subject relations. We used data from four large-scale samples of ninth-graders (N = 866–6146) on academic self-concept, interest, and anxiety in three subjects (mathematics, French, and German). Our results underscored the importance of the components at the more global level: The major part of reliable individual differences in subject-specific measures of affective-motivational constructs and their relations to achievement indicators (grades and standardized test scores) was explained by the general components of the affective-motivational constructs and the global affective-motivational appraisals of specific subjects rather than by the construct-and-subject-specific components. Overall, the structural architecture of the integrative model provides a way to simultaneously analyze complex within- and between-subject relations of affective-motivational constructs.