Achievement Imagery of Children`s Books and School Textbooks and (Academic) Performance

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Stefan Engeser
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2010 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 163723788

Based on correlational (i.e., field studies) and experimental studies of the preceding project, we would like to further examine the relationship of achievement imagery of children´s books and school textbooks and (academic) performance. In the field studies with children`s books, we could support our expectation. When children`s books with a high level of achievement imagery are popular within a federal state in Germany, the academic achievement in this federal state is higher, too. In the proposed project, we want to study this relationship on the individual level. We will assess the actual use of children`s books, the academic performance of children and the motives and values of parents. With these assessments, we are able to test the assumption that the achievement imagery of children´s books is associated with achievement behavior on an individual level and that a transmission of parental motives and values take place via children´s books.In the field studies with textbooks we could also confirm the positive relationship between achievement imagery and academic performance for 4th-graders (more clearly for math than for language arts textbooks); this holds on the level of the federal states as well as for the level of the classrooms as studied within the two large-scale assessments of academic performance. We would like to replicate the findings on the classroom level and study the relationship in experimental studies in samples of 4th-graders. On the federal-state level of 9th-graders, the relationships could not be confirmed. For math we even found some evidence of a negative relationship and we would like to take this into further consideration in our proposed experimental studies.Our experimental work showed that higher levels of achievement imagery in excerpts of textbooks (math, language) lead to higher performance. This provides evidence that textbooks could have a priming effect that fosters academic performance. Additional results indicate that the priming effect is mediated by a stronger explicit achievement motivation and higher outcome expectancies. Initially, we expected that the effect would be mediated by the implicit achievement motive and incentives, but we even found a few negative effects in this respect. Based on these results, we want to study contrast effects, differentiate achievement primes with respect to their expectancy and incentive connotations, and examine the differential effects of these connotations for the implicit and explicit achievement motive. Furthermore, we want to deepen our study of the process variables, studying priming effect in 4th-graders, and select more representative textbook material. Our aim is to contribute both to a better understanding of the priming effect from a scientific perspective and to explain the negative effects of the field and experimental studies, as well as to contribute to empirically founded, practical recommendations for the design of instructional materials.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants