Adolescent Motivation and Engagement:
A Narrative Discussion of Two Participants

Note on pseudonyms: All participant names used in this discussion are pseudonyms.

The motivation and engagement of adolescent learners is shaped by a complex interplay of personal, relational, and structural factors that resist simple explanation. To explore this complexity, I conducted interviews with two groups of participants who had recently completed secondary schooling in North America. Both groups attended schools operating in contexts meaningfully different from Aotearoa New Zealand — in terms of curriculum structure, school culture, and social demographics. This was a deliberate choice: by speaking with rangatahi in Canadian and American schooling contexts, it becomes possible to tentatively identify what may be universal in adolescent motivation and engagement, as distinct from what is shaped by local conditions. Where similar patterns emerge across such different settings, they carry a degree of cross-cultural weight. Participant A (pseudonym: Luca), a young man of approximately eighteen years who had recently left a Canadian high school, described an experience marked by profound social adversity and fractured teacher-student relationships. Participant B — comprising three young women (pseudonyms: Brooke, Madison, and Skye) who attended a public high school in Texas — described a more conditionally engaged experience, motivated by social connection and hands-on learning but disengaged by meaningless tasks and impersonal feedback. Drawing on self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000), expectancy-value theory (Eccles, 1983; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), and attribution theory (Weiner, 1992), I offer tentative explanations for the contrasting motivation profiles these participants described — and considers what those profiles might illuminate about ākonga engagement more broadly.

Luca (Participant A) attended a public high school in Canada. He described his experience in stark terms: bullied and ridiculed throughout secondary school, largely abandoned by a significant caregiver in the period leading up to high school, and subjected to what he characterised as systematic neglect by teaching staff. He described his teachers as having simply passed him in order to remove him from their classes — a perception suggesting that the school's institutional response to his difficulties was exclusion rather than support. Despite these conditions, Luca articulated a clear aspirational driver in the earlier years of his schooling: a desire to be successful and to access tertiary education, partly shaped by family expectations. This initial orientation toward achievement, however, appeared to have been progressively eroded by his experiences, leaving him describing his persistence in school less as motivated engagement and more as a form of bare survival.

Brooke, Madison, and Skye (Participant B) attended a public high school in Texas and described a more conditionally engaged experience. What kept them motivated was primarily the social dimension of schooling — meeting new people, forming peer relationships, and working in collaborative, interactive contexts such as laboratory activities and language tasks. They were explicit about the conditions under which engagement collapsed: homework perceived as pointless busy-work, teachers who compared students to one another rather than recognising individual growth, and the competing demands of sport and extracurricular commitments. Both parents were actively supportive of their education, and an older sibling who had recently completed secondary school provided a proximal and credible source of guidance and encouragement.

Self-determination theory, as articulated by Deci and Ryan (2000) and Ryan and Deci (2000), proposes that human motivation is fundamentally sustained by three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When these needs are supported in educational environments, intrinsic motivation flourishes; when they are frustrated, motivation is undermined and disengagement becomes an adaptive response. The contrasting experiences of Luca and the three Texan participants map strikingly onto this framework — and that these patterns emerged independently across a Canadian and an American schooling context perhaps lends them a degree of cross-cultural weight.

For Luca, all three needs appear to have been systematically denied. His perception that teachers had passed him simply to remove him from their classes reflects a profound frustration of the need for competence: rather than experiencing growth and mastery, he received implicit institutional messages that his performance was below any meaningful threshold. His description of being picked on and ridiculed by peers throughout high school suggests an equally severe disruption to his sense of relatedness — the need for genuine connection and belonging within a social environment. Autonomy, defined by Deci and Ryan (2000) as the experience of volition and self-determination in one's actions, is difficult to sustain in the conditions Luca described, where institutional structures appeared designed to manage rather than support him. It may be that his early motivation — a desire to be successful, to go to college — represents an internalised form of extrinsic regulation, driven by family aspirations rather than autonomous self-determination. The progressive erosion of this motivation, as relational conditions worsened, is consistent with SDT's prediction that need-thwarting environments convert even well-internalised goals into sources of distress (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

"When the social environment provides support for people's basic psychological needs, people will not only perform better but will also thrive psychologically."

Deci & Ryan (2000, p. 229)

Brooke, Madison, and Skye's responses suggest a more nuanced relationship with the three needs. Relatedness was clearly a significant source of motivation: meeting new people and the social dimensions of schooling were cited as primary drivers of continued engagement. Interactive, hands-on assignments appear to have supported their sense of competence by providing accessible, tangible evidence of capability. The frustration they expressed toward meaningless homework and impersonal feedback, however, points to a recurring threat to autonomy: tasks experienced as arbitrary or disconnected from personal goals undermine the sense of volitional engagement that Deci and Ryan (2000) identify as central to sustained motivation. That the group remained broadly engaged despite these frustrations may reflect the protective function of strong relational needs being met through peer and family relationships.

Eccles' (1983) expectancy-value theory proposes that student motivation is determined by two key appraisals: expectations of success — whether the student believes they can succeed at a task — and the subjective value they attach to the task, including intrinsic interest, utility value, attainment value, and perceived cost. Applied to these two participants, the theory illuminates important structural differences in their motivational trajectories.

Luca's early motivational orientation resonates strongly with utility value: he was driven, at least initially, by the belief that performing well in high school would enable him to access college and build a better life. Wigfield and Eccles (2000) note that utility value — the perceived usefulness of a task for future goals — can sustain engagement even in the absence of intrinsic interest. However, expectancy-value theory also accounts for the critical role of cost: the psychological and social price a student must pay to remain engaged. For Luca, the cost of engagement was extraordinarily high. Participating in a school environment where he was ridiculed by peers, where his teachers appeared indifferent or actively hostile, and where he lacked emotional support at home required enormous personal expenditure. It is perhaps unsurprising that, over time, even a strong utility value proved insufficient to offset these costs, and disengagement became the less painful alternative.

For Brooke, Madison, and Skye, the expectancy-value framework helps explain a more selective pattern of engagement. They were not broadly disengaged but rather engaged conditionally — highly motivated in contexts perceived as relevant and interactive, and largely disengaged in contexts perceived as arbitrary or disconnected from real purposes. Their view that homework which does not demonstrably help the learner is not worth doing reflects a clear attunement to utility value: tasks must demonstrate a plausible connection to future benefit or immediate growth to warrant investment. Their expectancies of success appear to have been positively supported by parental encouragement and sibling guidance, providing important scaffolding for the self-belief that Wigfield and Eccles (2000) identify as central to sustained academic motivation.

Weiner's (1992) attribution theory examines how explanations for academic outcomes shape motivation. When teachers attribute student failure to stable, internal, uncontrollable causes — perceived low ability or hopelessness — they communicate low expectations, invest less effort, and inadvertently confirm the outcomes they anticipated. The attributional climate a teacher creates, whether consciously or not, has significant consequences for student engagement over time.

Luca's account suggests an attributional environment of precisely this kind. His perception that teaching staff had simply processed him through the system rather than engaging with him as a learner implies that institutional actors had made a stable, internal attribution about his potential — that he was not capable of meaningful academic achievement — and had acted accordingly. Weiner (1992) argues that such environments not only damage motivation in the short term but also shape students' own attributional styles over time. A student who is repeatedly communicated, implicitly or explicitly, that their difficulties reflect fixed, internal deficiencies is likely to internalise helplessness rather than persistence. This could plausibly explain the trajectory Luca described: an early, aspiration-driven motivation progressively displaced by a sense of fundamental unbelonging within the school system. Bishop and Berryman (2009) document comparable attributional dynamics in New Zealand classrooms, where deficit-framed assumptions about Māori students' potential have contributed to persistent disparities in engagement and achievement; Webber (2012) similarly highlights that racial-ethnic identity is a significant factor in Māori students' academic engagement and sense of belonging in school.

The contrast with Brooke, Madison, and Skye is instructive. They described moments where teachers recognised individual progress and asked what students needed in order to improve — attributional practices consistent with Weiner's (1992) model of controllable, unstable causation, where improvement is framed as achievable through effort and support rather than determined by fixed ability. Parental figures who communicated consistent confidence and an older sibling whose recent experience made success feel proximate and attainable reinforced a similarly growth-oriented attributional framework. The difference in motivational outcomes between these two groups may reflect, at least in part, the cumulative effect of very different attributional environments over the course of their secondary schooling.

These interviews illuminate the degree to which adolescent motivation and engagement are products not of individual disposition but of the relational and structural conditions in which learning takes place. Luca's experience suggests that when the three basic psychological needs identified by Deci and Ryan (2000) are persistently denied, when the cost of engagement far exceeds its perceived value, and when institutional attributions communicate fixed low potential, disengagement becomes not a failure of character but a rational adaptive response to an environment experienced as hostile. Brooke, Madison, and Skye's more conditional engagement, by contrast, demonstrates that motivation can be sustained when tasks are perceived as relevant, when social needs are met through peer and family relationships, and when feedback honours individual growth rather than comparative performance. Together, these participants — from markedly different schooling contexts in Canada and the United States — suggest that the differences between motivated and disengaged adolescent learners may lie less in the students themselves than in the conditions their environments have produced. This is consistent with Alton-Lee's (2003) Best Evidence Synthesis, which identifies teacher practice and the design of learning conditions — rather than fixed student characteristics — as the primary determinants of educational outcomes for diverse learners in Aotearoa New Zealand.

My own practicum experience in Aotearoa New Zealand offers a modest illustration of this principle. A student who had faced significant personal challenge, and who had not always found it straightforward to feel accepted in school, crocheted a small rabbit and presented it as a gift at the year's end. The gesture spoke not to academic performance but to an experience of feeling genuinely seen and valued as a person. It is a quiet reminder, consistent with Deci and Ryan (2000), that relatedness is not peripheral to motivation — for some ākonga, it is its very foundation.