Exploring College Students' Expressed Concern about Their Academic Performance
Abstract College students' academic performance is their primary concern (Houston, 1971), which is believed to hinder their learning unless managed either actively or passively (Boekaerts, 1993). Thus, the purposes of this investigation were to explore (a) how college students express concern about their academic performance to their instructors, (b) sex differences in expressed academic concerns, and (c) how these expressed academic concern behaviors are related to students' intrinsic motivation. The results of frequency counts, EFAs, a linear regression, and an independent samples t-test indicate that both male and female college students actively express academic performance concerns to their instructors. However, students' tendencies to express academic performance concerns were influenced positively by their level of intrinsic motivation. Moreover, the methods used coupled with the findings obtained in this study establish construct, content, and face validity of the Academic Concern Scale, which was developed in this study. Keywords: academic performance, concern, motivation, student-instructor interactions ********** The life of many college students is stressful and challenging (Medora & Woodward, 1986) because they often are concerned about their psychological health (Kitzrow, 2003), financial situations, future careers, personal lives, and academic performance (Harman, 1971; Strong, Hendel, & Bratton, 1971). Fortunately, college students prefer to manage their concerns by actively approaching their problems (Boekaerts, 1993). Thus, colleges offer services to help students manage their concerns, including financial aid offices, advising and career centers, disability services, counseling centers, health clinics, and tutoring centers. However, college students' primary concern is their academic performance (Houston, 1971), which they often discuss with their instructors (Cotton & Wilson, 2006; Martin, Myers, & Mottet, 1999) To date, however, instructional communication scholars have neglected to examine how college students express academic performance concerns to their instructors. This gap in the literature is perplexing because being concerned may inhibit students' learning (Boekaerts, 1993) and numerous researchers (Martin, Mottet, & Myers, 2000; Martin et al., 1999; Myers, Martin, & Knapp, 2005; Williams & Frymier, 2007) have argued that student-instructor interactions are essential to students' success. These studies focus on students' out-of-class communication with their instructors and students' motives for communicating with their instructors. This body of research indicates that students' tendencies to communicate with their instructors are associated with students' traits as well as their cognitive and affective learning. To extend this line of research, however, it is essential to first explore how, where, when, in what classes, how frequently male and female college students' express academic performance concerns to their instructors, and its association with students' intrinsic motivation. Academic performance refers to the quality of students' completed classroom activities, tests, and other assignments (Pintrich & Groot, 1990). Concern, however, is a more convoluted concept. Concern has been conceptualized as caring, worrying, and being interested (ABA, 1980; Concern, 2013; Winnicott, 1963). Other scholars have provided more detailed conceptualizations of concern, which indicate that concern is a psychological phenomena (Tolmacz, 2006) that arises as a result of a situational appraisal (Spillers, 2004) in which people perceive an imbalance between the "task demands and available resources to meet these demands" (Boekaerts, 1993, p. 150). Boekaerts argued further that a perceived imbalance between tasks and resources can be either satisfying (i.e., the resources meet the task demands) or annoying (i.e., the resources are insufficient for the task demands). …