1. What is developing?
The authors of both of these papers begin with a discussion of how they
conceptualize their dependent measures. Spinath and Spinath define learning
motivation in terms of a general orientation to liking school learning tasks and
wanting to learn and understand new things in school. They ground this operational
definition in theories of intrinsic motivation and learning/mastery (as opposed to
performance) goals. I agree that this component of task value is likely to be the most
central particularly during the elementary school years, when children are not yet
expert at regulating their own behaviors to learn things they do not particularly
enjoy doing. Like Harter (1998), Spinath and Spinath define academic competence
beliefs in terms of a general belief about how good one is at doing school work and
how easy it is for one to learn new things at school. Unfortunately, with the
exception of the year 1 competence beliefs for the youngest children, the six-month,
across-time stabilities for both of these constructs is very high e making it very
difficult to reliably test any lagged causal relation between these two constructs using
population, variable-centered level of analysis. Thus, they had set themselves
a difficult methodological task to test their main hypothesis.