The effects of motivational and metacognitive variables on immigrant and non-immigrant students’ reading achievement

Intrinsic and extrinsic types of motivation have been widely studied, and the distinction between them has shed important light on both developmental and educational practices. In this review we revisit the classic definitions of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in light of contemporary research and theory. Intrinsic motivation remains an important construct, reflecting the natural human propensity to learn and assimilate. However, extrinsic motivation is argued to vary considerably in its relative autonomy and thus can either reflect external control or true self-regulation. The relations of both classes of motives to basic human needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are discussed. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

Response bias shows up in many fields of behavioural and healthcare research where self-reported data are used. We demonstrate how to use stochastic frontier estimation (SFE) to identify response bias and its covariates. In our application to a family intervention, we examine the effects of participant demographics on response bias before and after participation; gender and race/ethnicity are related to magnitude of bias and to changes in bias across time, and bias is lower at post-test than at pre-test. We discuss how SFE may be used to address the problem of 'response shift bias' - that is, a shift in metric from before to after an intervention which is caused by the intervention itself and may lead to underestimates of programme effects.