Predicting Change in School Motivation Profiles among Canadian and Belgian Adolescents: The Role of Parenting Practices and Youth’s Mental Health.

Maintaining youth’s motivation throughout high school is a key factor leading to positive school attitudes, academic success, and graduation. While a decrease of average motivation levels has been documented in high school, such finding overshadows the individual student motivation trajectories and the factors predicting change. In this study, we monitored the stability of motivation profiles across one school year among 435 Canadian and 414 Belgian adolescents who completed self-reported measures on motivation, parental, and mental health variables. We explored the role of parenting practices (i.e., need-supportive parenting, parental warmth/rejection, and monitoring) and youth’s mental health in predicting transition between profiles. Three similar profiles were identified in both samples at two time points: High Quantity (highest intrinsic and extrinsic, lowest amotivation), Moderately Motivated (moderate intrinsic, higher extrinsic, low amotivation), and Poor Quality (lowest intrinsic, moderately high extrinsic, highest amotivation). Latent transition analysis indicated that, on average, 71% of participants remained in the same profile, 17% moved toward a more highly intrinsically motivated profile, and 12% transitioned into a less intrinsically motivated profile. A mover-stayer analysis revealed that an increase in need-supportive parenting practices (autonomy support, parental structure, interpersonal involvement) predicted students’ transition toward a higher-quality motivation profile. The relative stability of motivation profiles highlights the need to promote and support motivation in the early years of schooling, and consistently thereafter. Nevertheless, our results suggest that a change in the adolescent’s family environment can still affect their motivation patterns as they strive to be more autonomous.