PE Grades May Reveal More Than Performance: They Track Teenagers’ Hedonic Motivation to Move

A report card grade in physical education is usually read as a simple verdict on how well a student performs. A new study from the University of Potsdam suggests it may carry a second, less obvious message: how much a teenager actually wants to move. Analyzing data from 547 German school students aged 10 to 19, researchers Jona Kunz and Ralf Brand found that PE grades were strongly associated with what exercise psychologists call hedonic motivation — the affectively grounded tendency to seek out or avoid movement experiences. The work, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, offers one of the first direct empirical bridges between the routine machinery of school assessment and a contemporary theory of why people do or do not stay physically active.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the Affective-Reflective Theory of physical inactivity and exercise, or ART, developed by Brand and Paddy Ekkekakis. ART holds that repeated pleasant and unpleasant experiences during exercise accumulate into automatic affective valuations — fast, associative judgments that are activated whenever a person encounters an opportunity to be active. Pleasant movement histories strengthen approach impulses; unpleasant ones reinforce avoidance. Building on this, the Affective Exercise Experiences framework, AFFEXX, treats a person’s exercise-related affective history as a summative representation, with its hedonic core captured by an antipathy–attraction dimension: attraction reflects a pull toward movement contexts, antipathy a tendency toward disengagement and withdrawal.

What makes PE grades interesting in this light is the peculiar visibility of the subject itself. Unlike mathematics or languages, PE evaluates students in an embodied, socially comparative arena, where effort, persistence, reluctance, and withdrawal are on public display. German sport-pedagogy explicitly expects grades to incorporate not only sport-motor performance but also individual progress, effort, social participation, and cognitive achievement, and qualitative research with German PE teachers confirms that these dimensions enter grading practice, even if motor performance carries the greatest weight. If attraction or antipathy toward movement leaks into those observable behaviors, the researchers reasoned, then grades might indirectly register a student’s affective relationship with exercise — not by measuring it, but by covarying with it.

To test this, the team administered a PE-specific German version of the AFFEXX questionnaire, the AFFEXX-PEG, adapted for adolescents and piloted for clarity. The instrument consists of 36 bipolar items rated on a seven-point scale from −3, indicating very negative experience, to +3, indicating very positive experience. The analysis focused on the antipathy–attraction subscale, which showed good internal consistency in the sample (Cronbach’s α = 0.86). Students also reported the PE grades from their two most recent report cards. Because German secondary schools use two different systems — a six-point scale in lower and middle secondary school and a 15-point scale in upper secondary — all grades were converted to the 15-point scale, where 15 corresponds to the German 1+ (very good) and 0 to a fail, roughly comparable to a U.S. GPA of 4.0 and 0.0 respectively.

The statistical strategy was deliberately exploratory. A Pearson correlation quantified the crude association between grades and hedonic motivation, and a linear mixed-effects model then estimated the adjusted association while accounting for sex, a grade-by-sex interaction, and developmental differences across school grade levels, which entered the model as a random intercept. Because school and class identifiers were not consistently available under the convenience-based recruitment, clustering at those levels could not be modeled; the authors instead report unstandardized effect estimates with 95% confidence intervals, using restricted maximum likelihood estimation and Satterthwaite’s method for approximate degrees of freedom.

The headline result is the sheer strength of the association. Hedonic motivation and PE grades correlated at r = 0.58, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.52 to 0.63 — a substantial relationship for two constructs that are, on the face of it, conceptually distinct: one an externally assigned evaluation of performance and participation, the other a self-reported affective orientation toward movement. In the adjusted model, better grades predicted higher antipathy–attraction scores among girls (b = 0.38, 95% CI 0.33–0.44) and among boys (b = 0.26, 95% CI 0.19–0.32). At the mean grade level, boys scored higher than girls overall (b = 0.84, 95% CI 0.65–1.03), and the interaction term (b = −0.13, 95% CI −0.21 to −0.04) showed that the grade–motivation link was significantly steeper for girls.

The descriptive sex differences were pronounced. Girls’ mean antipathy–attraction score was 0.35 (SD = 1.44) against boys’ 1.47 (SD = 1.11), a difference corresponding to a large effect size of d = −0.87. Girls’ scores clustered closer to the neutral midpoint of the −3 to +3 scale and extended further into negative territory: 34% of girls reported scores below neutral, compared with only 10% of boys. Grades told a parallel story. Girls averaged 11.17 (SD = 2.23) on the 15-point scale, boys 12.10 (SD = 2.00), a moderate difference (d = −0.41), with both means falling in the German “good” band but boys edging toward “very good.”

The model-implied crossover points sharpened the picture considerably. Predicted antipathy–attraction scores crossed into the positive range at substantially lower grades for boys than for girls. Boys tended to remain on the attraction side of the scale across a broad span of grade levels, whereas among girls, predicted motivation typically turned positive only at better grades. Descriptively, 31.6% of girls had grades at or below the model-implied neutral point of 10.3 on the German scale — roughly a U.K. GCSE grade 5–6 — and among those girls, 70% reported antipathy. In other words, a PE grade that looks perfectly satisfactory from an achievement standpoint can coincide with an accumulated hedonic orientation against movement, particularly for girls.

The authors are careful about what this does and does not mean. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causal direction: attraction may drive the engagement, effort, and persistence that teachers reward with better grades, or grading experiences may themselves feed into students’ affective valuations through the associative learning processes ART describes — or both may unfold reciprocally. Nor do grades directly measure motivation. Self-reported grades carry the usual risks of recall error and social desirability, although the sample’s grade distribution aligns broadly with previous German and European data. The use of overall report-card grades also prevents disentangling whether the association is driven by motor performance or by components such as effort, progress, or social participation. The German and broader European context, where PE aims extend beyond performance to social, cognitive, and health-related development, further bounds the interpretation.

Even so, the practical implication is striking precisely because it is so mundane. Psychological assessments of affective-motivational orientation are rarely available in everyday schools, but PE grades exist for virtually every student. Used reflectively rather than literally, a modest grade — especially a girl’s — could serve as a prompt for a conversation or a brief affective check-in about how the student actually experiences movement, complementing rather than replacing direct attention to students’ experiences. The authors caution against reading any given grade as reflecting the same motivation in every student, and they call for longitudinal research with verified grades and repeated assessments to trace how grading experiences, participation, and hedonic motivation become entangled over time. What the study establishes is the starting point: the most routine number in a student’s report card appears to whisper something about the pleasure, or displeasure, they have come to associate with moving their body.

Subject of Research: The association between physical education grades and hedonic motivation toward exercise in adolescent girls and boys

Article Title: Physical education grades as markers of hedonic motivation to move: affective experiences from PE in adolescent girls and boys

Article References: Physical education grades as markers of hedonic motivation to move: affective experiences from PE in adolescent girls and boys. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1922786

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1922786

Keywords: physical education, hedonic motivation, adolescents, exercise psychology, affective experiences, grading, sex differences, physical activity, AFFEXX, affective-reflective theory, school sport, Germany