Developmental changes in achievement motivation and affect in physical education: Growth trajectories and demographic differences.

Objective: We examined changes in student achievement goals, perceptions of motivational climate and
affective responses in secondary school physical education.
Method: Greek junior high school students (N ¼ 394; 191 males and 203 females) responded to a multisection
questionnaire twice a year from the ages of 12 to 15 years.
Results: Multilevel modeling analyses showed significant linear decreases in perceptions of taskinvolving
teacher climate, task and ego goal orientations, which were somewhat reversed by the
beginning of the last year of the junior high school. Significant linear decreases were also observed for
enjoyment whereas there were significant linear increases for perceptions of ego-involving climate and
boredom. There was significant variability in the intercepts and/or average changes over time for all
variables and, therefore, we included demographic and theoretical predictors in an attempt to account
for such variations.
Conclusion: The results indicated that decreases in adaptive motivation over time vary across students
and in some cases may be tackled by fostering a task-involving teacher climate.