Abstract
Purpose: This study aims to compare underachievers with overachievers about learning and retention of verbal materials under task-oriented and ego-oriented motivatialon instructions.
Method: The subjects are 529 junior high school students, and experimenters are 3 well-acquainted teachers and 3 unacquainted psychologists. Learning of nonsense syllables and retention for 24 hours were inspected. Comparison of recall scores of underachievers, achievers and overachievers was evaluated under different motivational instructions.
Results:(1) Overachievers have a tendency to be superior to underachievers about habits of rehearsal after learning. But about strength of motivation on experimental situation underachievers are inferior to overachievers only in the case of unacquainted experimenters under ego-oriented situation.
(2) About results of learning and retention overachiever are best and achievers are better than underachievers under either motivational instruction.
(3) About results of learning and retention egooriented Ss are superior to task-oriented Ss under every experimenter. But the differences in both achievers and underachievers are larger than that in overachievers.
(4) In either group of achievement scores, the difference of recall scores between two motivational instructions by unacquainted experimenters is more remarkable than by well-acquainted teachers.
