ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Dev. Psychol.
Sec. Adolescent Psychological Development
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdpys.2025.1566872
This article is part of the Research TopicContemporary Issues in the Study of Adolescent Gender DevelopmentView all articles
Who feels academically efficacious? Moving beyond the gender binary
Provisionally accepted
- 1T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States
- 2T. Denny Sanford Harmony Institute, Tempe, Arizona, United States
- 3Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The goal was to explore global and domain-specific academic motivation using finegrained assessments of self-social gender identity, specifically, early adolescent students' ratings of "gender similarity", that is, how similar they feel to the two major gender collectives. From these assessments, four profiles of gender identity were generated and were used to explore how variations in profiles related to both general and specific academic motivation. Participants included an ethnically/racially diverse community sample of binary-identified children (n = 1,642; 47% girls; Mage = 9.05, SD = 0.91) in Grades 3 to 5 from 77 classrooms in eight elementary schools. Analyses revealed that global motivation was significantly higher for students who reported feeling similar to one or both gender collectives, and lowest for those who reported low feelings of similarity to both gender collectives. Specific motivation in genderspecific domains (reading, math, science) was not related to gender similarity profiles. The findings suggest that the self-social gender identity is important for understanding global academic motivation but less so for understanding academic motivation in specific genderstereotypic domains such as reading and math/science.
Keywords: gender identity, gender similarity, academic motivation, Academic gender stereotypes, gender
Received: 25 Jan 2025; Accepted: 21 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Martin, Xiao, Peng and Hanish. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Carol Lynn Martin, T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, Tempe, 85287-3701, Arizona, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.