The motivation-achievement paradox in international educational achievement tests: Toward a better understanding

Abstract

There is a recurrent paradox in the data of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): within each participating country, there is a positive correlation between students’ learning motivation and achievement; when aggregating the data at country level, this correlation becomes negative. Using PISA data across 64 countries, we investigate the association of motivation and achievement within and between countries and attempt to explain the paradox with three measures indicative of culturally preferred scale usage: cultural response style, overclaiming, and anchoring vignettes. We confi rmed the paradox and found that the three measures, in particular anchoring vignettes, could partially explain the negative association between motivation and achievement at country level. Our study is intellectually indebted to the tradition, initiated by David Watkins, to go beyond a simple classifi cation of Chinese learners as focusing on rote memory learning. We illustrate how core Chinese values impinge on educational motivation and achievement and can help to explain seemingly paradoxical cross-cultural differences.