Fostering excellence: Nurturing motivation and performance among high- and average-ability students through need-supportive teaching.

When students with high cognitive abilities disengage from school, this implies a severe loss of talent to students themselves and to society. Hence, it is important to understand how teachers can prevent disengagement and underachievement in high-ability students. Whereas a large body of research has demonstrated that need-supportive teaching (i.e., the provision of autonomy support, involvement, and structure) and differentiated instruction relate positively to students' academic development, it remains unclear whether such practices would be equally, more, or less beneficial for high-ability students. Drawing on data from a longitudinal four-wave study among early adolescents from Flanders (N = 3586), this study showed that need-supportive teaching in math classes was positively associated with intrinsic motivation, behavioral engagement, and math performance in high-ability students, both at the level of between-student differences and at the level of changes in students over time. Standardized estimates were typically between 0.05 and 0.20 at the between-person level, indicating small effect sizes, with more modest effect sizes at the within-person level. Importantly, these associations were found to be generally equivalent across high- and average-ability students. Comparing the provision of need-supportive teaching to either high- or average-ability students, high-ability students particularly reported more autonomy support from their math teachers than average-ability students, with small effect sizes (i.e., Cohen's d between 0.16 and 0.27). These findings underline the importance of need-supportive teaching to support the motivational and academic development of both high- and average-ability students.

Profiles of maladaptive school motivation among high-ability adolescents: A person-centered exploration of the motivational Pathways to Underachievement model.

INTRODUCTION: The Pathways to Underachievement model (PUM; Snyder & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2013) is a person-oriented framework identifying two distinct patterns of self- and value beliefs that help explain underachievement among cognitively highly able students. This framework was developed to clear up inconclusive findings from variable-centered underachievement research, but has not been previously empirically tested. METHODS: The present study aimed to test the PUM by investigating (a) whether the predicted motivational profiles are evident among a sample of high-ability students (IQ ≥ 120) beginning secondary school in Flanders, Belgium (N = 403, Mage = 12.2 years, 60.5% males) and (b) whether these profiles relate to students' (dis)engagement from and (under)achievement in school, as assessed by the students, their parents and teachers, and school grades. Latent profile analysis was performed on five motivational dimensions: academic self-concept, self-worth contingency, task value beliefs, entity beliefs, and attainment/utility value, and outcomes were compared across profiles using the BCH method. RESULTS: Latent profile analysis identified four profiles, each involving a distinct patterns of motivational variables. Two of the profiles exhibited maladaptive variable patterns consistent with the distinct profiles theorized by the PUM. Furthermore, profile differences in (dis)engagement and (under)achievement outcomes generally corresponded with the predictions of the PUM across multiple perspectives. CONCLUSION: This study found distinct maladaptive motivational profiles that were each linked to the outcomes hypothesized by the PUM. These findings establish empirically that there are qualitatively different types of high-ability underachievers, which supports the Pathways to Underachievement model and gives momentum to person-oriented analysis within underachievement research.