Motivation and Gender

Discuss Sex Differences in Achievement Motivation with Special Reference to Fear of Success In the article Motivational and Gender Differences: Sixth-Grade Students' Mathematical Problem-Solving Behaviour (Vermeer; Boekaerts & Seegers, 2000), students were measured on three separate categorises and results were recorded to determine the difference in achievement motivation between girls and boys when it comes to mathematics. The findings highlighted that boys and girls display different motivational orientations when it comes to mathematics as girls showed higher persistence while boys performed better and with more confidence and motivation. A possible explanation for gender differences involves differing levels of motivation between boys and girls. For example, Saarni (1984) suggested that there may be more social pressure for girls to act nice. The research on individual differences in achievement motivation has yielded interesting findings on the characteristics of people who score high in the need for achievement (Weiten 2007). The findings in the article show that when it came to confidence there were no gender differences but the students overall confidence ratings were higher for the application problems than for the computation problems showing higher motivation for application problems. Gender differences were especially evident in relation to applied problem solving. Girls started working on the application problems with lower subjective motivational competence than did boys, and were more inclined than boys to attribute bad results to lack of capacity, motivation and to the difficulty of the task. This finding is consistent with earlier research findings Fennema, (1985); Seegers & Boekaerts, (1996) Other studies have shown that when it comes to school, gender does not effect motivation. Slate, John and Jones (1998) discovered that there was no gender differences went it came to students perceiving science to be