Assessing The Gap: How Well Motivated Are Primary School Aged Boys To Succeed In Writing?

There is a clear gap in writing, where boys do worse than girls. Boy’s consistent underachievement in this area is an injustice that the government, with other agencies have identified but have not yet fully addressed. We need to assess how well boys engage with the current writing strategies. It is important to ensure that the causes of why this gap was there in the first place are analysed. The fact boys are underachieving in writing is an injustice that I think needs to be addressed. Motivation has always been one factor that has been attributed to boys underachieving. There are four main strands to this theory: self-efficiency, attribution, self-worth and achievement goal theory.

The self-efficiency theory is the pupil’s belief that he or she is able or unable to perform the task at hand and is correlated with achievement-related behaviour. A child will avoid a situation they believe they can not succeed in, however they will do tasks they are sure they will do well in

The attribution theory refers to the perceived cause of an outcome, a person’s explanation of why a particular event turned out as it did. Of course in the classroom setting this would display itself as a child having done well in a writing task as the outcome and the reason for this may be them applying a lot of effort, or sufficient knowledge or doing what the teacher has said and so on in order to pass. If a child failed this task the cause may be lack of effort or lack of knowledge and so on.

The self-worth theory are the attempts made by the pupil to maintain or enhance their self worth. Boys looking as though they have the ability to perform becomes the means of protecting one’s self-worth.

The final strand is the achievement goal theory. This theory says student’s motivation can be explained in their attempts to achieve goals. This theory works upon two different types of goal seeking pupil: those seeking learning goals and those seeking performance goals. Those seeking performance goals often have low self esteem and will choose easy goals to ensure success.