Hargreaves, Eleanore;
Quick, Laura;
Buchanan, Denise;
(2025)
'This is too boring': a life-history approach to primary pupils' distress and lack of motivation for school-work.
Pastoral Care in Education
10.1080/02643944.2025.2454650.
(In press).
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Abstract
While engagement in school learning is key to high attainment, very little research has explored what motivates engagement as seen from the child’s perspective. This paper addresses what motivates engagement – and alternatively what might promote aversion from engagement – among primary-school children designated by the current system in England as ‘lower-attaining’. We consider the relationship between their distress and educational policy that promotes grouping by attainment. We used Self Determination Theory (SDT) as our guiding theoretical framework to explore these children’s distress as related to lack of motivation to engage in school-work. We employed the life-history approach with a group of 23 ‘lower-attaining’ primary-school children. We report how two of these children, as case studies, described their engagement during schooling over five years from age 7 in primary-school to age 12 in secondary-school, during termly activity-interviews and classroom observations (for full details of the wider study, see https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/48423-eleanore-hargreaves). We found that the children sometimes experienced distress, which took the form of anxiety, sorrow, anger and pain. These were triggered by, and in turn further promoted, a weak Sense of Competence, Autonomy and Relatedness. We consider in this article whether these negative experiences were related to policy emphasis on attainment in tests, because of how these defined competence narrowly in terms of test results in core subjects. The life-histories portray how distress may have hindered engagement, learning and wellbeing, ultimately infringing social justice.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | 'This is too boring': a life-history approach to primary pupils' distress and lack of motivation for school-work |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/02643944.2025.2454650 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2025.2454650 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
| Keywords: | Self determination theory (SDT), distress, lower-attaining, engagement, life-history |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203426 |
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