Motivational Profiles and Their Associations With Achievement Outcomes

With the belief that theoretical integration in motivation may help us better understand motivational behavior, we designed this study to explore adolescents' motiva-tional profiles and their associations with knowledge acquisition, leisure-time exercise behaviors, and cardiorespiratory fitness. Middle school students from a large urban inner-city school district (N = 603, ages 12–14) completed questionnaires assessing motivational constructs and leisure-time exercise behavior. Knowledge and cardiorespiratory fitness were also assessed with a knowledge test and the Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run (PACER) test, respectively. Using hierarchical cluster analysis, we found that students' motivation in physical education could be explained from a multi-theoretical perspective. The interactive patterns among different motivation constructs were homogeneous overall and associated with in-class effort, knowledge, and leisure-time exercise behavior. These findings suggest that students' development in physical education may depend upon a collective impact of changes in knowledge, physical activity ability, and sources of motivation. Physical activity involvement steeply declines during adolescent years (Pate et al., 2005). Specifically, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Growth and Health Study reported that adolescents' median activity scores decreased dramatically between the ages of 12 and 18 years (Kimm et al., 2002). Several government agencies and public health authorities have established guidelines for physical activity among young people, but most adolescents are not active at these recommended levels (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1997; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). Consequently, rates of obesity and type II diabetes are increasing among all young age groups, and are particularly high among urban minority adolescents There is a consensus among public health professionals that school-centered interventions, especially physical education based, are promising avenues to promote physical activities for all school-age children (Corbin, 2002). Evidence in recent studies (Morgan, Beighle, & Pangrazi, 2007) strongly suggests that physical education makes an immediate and unique contribution to adolescents' daily physical activity involvement. Clearly, understanding adolescents' motivational characteristics and their relationships with physical activity knowledge and involvement will aid physical educators in the design of effective physical education programs. Researchers studying motivation in physical education have generated many informative findings (e. constructs from theories on achievement goals, task value, and self-determination have been identified as important motivators involved in the teaching and learning of physical education (Solmon, 2003). Since the pioneering work by Duda and Nicholls (1992), researchers in physical education have adopted achievement goal theory as a major theoretical framework for studying motivation. Similar …