David B. Miele

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Boston College

Researchers from social and educational psychology have typically taken distinct approaches to investigating how individuals regulate their motivational states. The metamotivational framework that we describe in this article serves to bridge these approaches by drawing on insights from the literatures on metacognition and emotion regulation. Metamo...

The “remembered success effect” (Finn, 2010) refers to the finding that challenging academic tasks that start or end with extra opportunities for success are preferred to challenging tasks that do not include these opportunities. Work on remembered success has primarily been done with adults. We assessed (in a preregistered study) whether the remem...

Researchers across theoretical traditions have long recognized the need for people to monitor and modulate certain aspects of their subjective experiences (such as their thoughts and feelings) in response to situational challenges that interfere with the attainment of important goals. Comparatively less attention has been devoted to understanding t...

Although intrinsic motivation is often viewed as preferable to more extrinsic forms of motivation, there is evidence that the adaptiveness of these motivational states depends on the nature of the task being completed (e.g., Cerasoli et al., 2014). Specifically, research suggests task-motivation fit such that intrinsic motivation tends to benefit p...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1124171.].

One of the challenges of effectively managing others is flexibly equipping them for tasks that may differ significantly in their motivational demands. Using a metamotivational approach (Scholer et al., 2018) in the domain of regulatory focus (Higgins, 1997), five studies (N = 932) examine people’s metamotivational knowledge of how to actively manag...

Metamotivation research suggests that people understand the benefits of engaging in high-level versus low-level construal (i.e., orienting toward the abstract, essential versus concrete, idiosyncratic features of events) in goal-directed behavior. The current research examines the psychometric properties of one assessment of this knowledge and test...

Challenging academic tasks that start or end with extra opportunities for success are sometimes preferred to challenging tasks that do not include these opportunities – this has been referred to as the “remembered success effect” (Finn, 2010). In a recent set of studies examining this effect, Finn and Miele (2016) presented participants with two ta...

General Audience Summary Sometimes students must complete academic tasks that are difficult or challenging while they work toward mastery of a critical topic or domain, such as mathematics. But when difficulty and failure is encountered during a challenging task, it can be demotivating, and may lead to students to disengage when they encounter simi...

Recent metamotivation research revealed that Westerners recognize that promotion versus prevention motivations benefit performance on eager versus vigilant tasks, respectively; that is, they know how to create task-motivation fit with respect to regulatory focus. Westerners also believe that, across tasks, promotion is more beneficial than preventi...

Metamotivation research suggests that people may be able to modulate their motivational states strategically to secure desired outcomes (Scholer & Miele, 2016). To regulate one's motivational states effectively, one must at minimum understand (a) which states are more or less beneficial for a given task and (b) how to instantiate these states. In t...

Self-regulation research typically focuses on the modulation of thoughts, feelings, and behavior to achieve desired ends. We propose that understanding the regulation of the underlying motivational orientations that drive these reactions is a critical yet underappreciated research question. We review research on metamotivation—people’s understandin...

Research on self-regulation has primarily focused on how people exert control over their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which people manage their motivational states in the service of achieving valued goals. In this article, we explore an emerging line of research that focuses on people’s beliefs about...

This article builds on existing models of motivation regulation in order to examine how students identify and address motivational deficits (e.g., not enough motivation or not the right type of motivation). Integrating perspectives from the achievement motivation, metacognition, and emotion regulation literatures, we propose that metamotivational p...

Students’ thinking about the relation between effort and ability can influence their motivation, affect, and academic achievement. Students sometimes think of effort as inversely related to ability (such that people with low ability must work harder than people with high ability) and other times think of effort as positively related to ability (suc...

The present study examined the extent to which college students’ academic mindsets predicted their persistence when solving challenging math problems. The study included an experimental manipulation, in which participants initially received either an easy or a difficult arithmetic task. Following the manipulation, all participants solved two target...

One of the challenges of effective goal pursuit is being able to flexibly adapt to changing situations and demands. The current studies investigate whether individuals exhibit effective metamotivation—successful management of one’s motivational states—in creating fit between an optimal motivational orientation and specific task demands (e.g., induc...

The second edition of the Handbook of Motivation at School presents an integrated compilation of theory and research in the field. With chapters by leading experts, this book covers the major theoretical perspectives in the field as well as their application to instruction, learning, and social adjustment at school. Section I focuses on theoretical...

Three studies explored academic test performance in the context of regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997), which posits that individuals pursue goals with a focus on growth and advancement (i.e., a promotion orientation) or on safety and security (i.e., a prevention orientation). In Studies 1 and 2, we brought participants into the lab, induced th...

The present studies examined whether parents' beliefs about the fixedness of ability predict their self-reported interactions with their children. Parents' fixedness beliefs were measured at two levels of specificity: their general beliefs about intelligence and their beliefs about their children's math and verbal abilities. Study 1, conducted with...

Remembered utility is the retrospective evaluation about the pleasure and pain associated with a past experience. It can influence choices about repeating or avoiding similar situations in the future (Kahneman, 2000). A set of 5 experiments explored the remembered utility of effortful test episodes and how it impacted future test choices. Experimen...

The goal of the present studies was to examine whether students’ reasoning about the relation between levels of effort and ability is influenced by the perceived source of an individual’s effort. Two sources of others’ effort were examined: task-elicited effort, or effort due primarily to the subjective difficulty of the task, and self-initiated ef...

We investigated metacognition of agency in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS) using a computer task in which participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the downward moving X’s and avoid the O’s. They were then asked to make judgments of performance and judgments of agency. Objective control was either und...

The authors examine two kinds of factors that affect students’ motivation to engage in critical-analytic thinking. The first, which includes ability beliefs, achievement values, and achievement goal orientations, influences the quantitative relation between motivation and critical-analytic thinking; that is, whether students are sufficiently motiva...

The feeling of being in the zone (related to "flow") is marked by an elevated yet effortless sense of concentration. Prior research suggests that feelings of being in the zone are strongest when the demand posed by a task matches one's level of ability (i.e., the balance hypothesis). In the present article, we tested this hypothesis using a novel e...

How people correct their mistakes and sustain those corrections over time is a problem of central interest to education. It might be thought that the erroneous beliefs that people hold with high confidence would be especially difficult to correct. Interestingly, people correct these high confidence errors more easily than low confidence errors, a p...

Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (Mage = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders (Mage = 10.39) read...

The cues contributing to people's metacognitions of agency were investigated in two experiments in which people played a computer game that involved trying to "touch", via a mouse moving a cursor, downward scrolling X's (Experiment 1), or trying to "explode" the downward scrolling X's (Experiment 2). Both experiments varied (a) proximal action-rela...

In this chapter we present a novel framework that integrates motivational relevance and accessibility and outlines its implications for the study of memory. We first review a recent analysis of motivation (Higgins, 2011) and a recent framework linking motivational relevance and accessibility (Eitam & Higgins, 2010). We then propose and demonstrate...

Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) betw...

Because numerous studies have shown that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, a single dominant heuristic, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), has been posited to explain how people interpret encoding fluency when assessing their own memory. However, the inferences people draw from feelings of en...

Previous research overwhelmingly suggests that feelings of ease people experience while processing information lead them to infer that their comprehension is high, whereas feelings of difficulty lead them to infer that their comprehension is low. However, the inferences people draw from their experiences of processing fluency should also vary in ac...

The more accurately people assess their comprehension, the more likely they are to engage in study behaviors that precisely target gaps in their learning. However, comprehension regulation involves more than knowing when to implement a new study strategy; it also involves deciding which strategy will most effectively resolve one's confusion. In two...

The national need for improved instruction in science, technology, and mathematics (STM) has been well documented (NCTM, 2000). As many studies have indicated, early childhood education can enhance later scholastic achievement, and a lack of appropriate teacher preparation can have lasting negative consequences for both individuals and society as a...