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Introduction
The understanding of students’ learning effectiveness is a critical and long-lasting area of research as this topic has important practical and scientific implications. Researchers tried to identify the antecedents of actual learning processes in educational programs (Garger et al., 2010; Eom et al., 2006) and they mainly focused on participants’ personal and social characteristics as the antecedents of learning effectiveness (El Massah and Fadly, 2017). Among the individuals’ characteristics, researchers discussed the role of individual absorptive capacity (Rezaei-Zadeh and Darwish, 2016), knowledge sourcing initiative (Gray and Meister, 2004) and learning orientation (Kang et al., 2018), while among students’ social characteristics that impact on the effectiveness of learning earlier research identified the network ties (Roy and Parsad, 2018), the shared understandings (Alavi and Tiwana, 2002) and the pro-sharing norms (Kankanhalli et al., 2005).
Assuming the existence of diverse types of motivations on a continuum that goes from the intrinsic to the extrinsic motivation suggested by self-determination theory (Vansteenkiste et al., 2008), recent research showed that individual motivation plays a crucial role in students’ learning effectiveness (Cerasoli et al., 2014). According to self-determination theory, the well-being of an individual is the result of satisfying the need for competence: believing that one person can act with competence in his environment for carrying out tasks. The individual who succeeds in fulfilling these needs acts motivated by intrinsic motivation. On the contrary, those who fail to satisfy this need, in carrying out their activities, are guided by a motivation for external regulation or pressures.
Regarding educational programs, earlier literature suggested examining individuals’ motivational profiles and their relationship with learning effectiveness (Vansteenkiste et al., 2010). This approach was undertaken with the aim to offer a more in-depth understanding of an individual’s motivations, which might also be instructive for those who implement specific educational programs for different individuals. It has been verified that students characterized by high intrinsic motivation and low extrinsic motivation displayed better learning effectiveness (Vansteenkiste et al., 2009).
The second stream of research focused on gender differences in educational effectiveness. Specifically, many researchers grappled investigating if and why there are differences in learning effectiveness between males and females (Pirmohamed et al., 2017) and identified one main reason behind these...