Emotional Elements and Achievement

Motivation varies with students’ interests and successes, and the degree to which their teachers’ styles match their own. Motivation changes class to class, teacher to teacher, and day to day. Persistence is an analytic quality. Analytic processors, more than global processors, “stay on task” while learning. Global processors often require “breaks” for intake, interaction, and focus changes. The older students become, the less Structure they need, although, under pressure (of exams or multiple study assignments), many college students require structure (Napolitano, 1986; Sawyer, 1995).

Responsibility tends to correlate with Conformity whereas students with low Responsibility scores are usually non-conforming (Dunn, White & Zenhausern, 1982). Some people experience three different stages of nonconformity—the “terrible twos”, “adolescence”, and “mid-life crisis”. Although some students are either consistently conforming or consistently nonconforming, others respond uniquely to particular situations. We know how to work with nonconforming students (Dunn & Griggs, 1995; Dunn, White, & Zenhausern, 1982).

A learning style inventory and keyboarding pre-and post-test administered (Sormunen, 1993) to 48 fourth graders showed persistence to be the only learning style factor related to achievement. Pretest score was related to final achievement, indicating that natural kinesthetic ability may affect keyboarding speed.