Knowledge transfer or social competence? A comparison of German and Canadian adolescent students on their socio-motivational relationships in school

Abstract

This cross-national study investigates the perception of the impact of students’ relationships towards teachers and peers on scholastic motivation in a total sample of 1477 seventh and eighth grade German ( N = 1088) and Canadian ( N = 389) secondary school students. By applying Multigroup Confirmatory Latent Class Analysis in Mplus we confirmed four different motivation types: (1) teacher-dependent; (2) peer-dependent; (3) teacher-and-peer-dependent; (4) teacher-and-peer-independent motivation types in Québec, Canada, as they were found in a preliminary study among German students in the state of Brandenburg ( Raufelder, Jagenow, Drury, & Hoferichter, 2013 ). However, across the two samples, the class sizes varied considerable. The largest group among Canadian students was composed of teacher-and-peer-dependent students, followed by teacher-and-peer-independent students, while the largest group among German students was composed of peer-dependent students, followed by teacher-and-peer-independent students. In both settings the teacher-dependent motivation type constituted the smallest group. These results manifest the different impacts of social environmental variables on the motivation of German and Canadian students, having practical implications for school psychologists and educators in general.