Affective and Social Mastery Motivation in Preschool as Predictors of Early School Success: A Longitudinal Study

Recent research has documented the importance of school readiness in young children. Children who start school without basic skills often continue to show lower achievement throughout schooling. Most current assessments of school readiness focus on early measures of academic skills, such as literacy and numeracy. Although these skills are useful in predicting school success, research suggests that socioemotional and motivational factors may be even more important. Moreover, although there is strong evidence supporting the importance of social and emotional competencies, such as emotion understanding and social skills, in school readiness, there is a dearth of research on the role of affective/expressive and social aspects of mastery/competence motivation in early school readiness and achievement. In the present study, we used Structural Equations Modeling to examine the role of affective aspects of mastery motivation, social mastery motivation, Socio-Economic Status (SES), and Intellectual Quotient (IQ) in preschool in longitudinally predicting math achievement, reading achievement, and social skills during grades 1 and 2 in 327 Hungarian children. Results indicated that children's negative reactions to failure/challenge predicted all of these measures of school performance, over and above the role of child IQ and SES; in addition, mastery pleasure predicted reading, and persistence in peer interaction predicted social skills in the early grades. Results contribute to the growing literature supporting the importance of motivation and of achievement-related emotions in school readiness and school success.