Promoting students’ self-determined motivation in maths: results of a 1-year classroom intervention

Introduction

SDT in Educational Context

• Self-determined motivation tends to decline in secondary school
• The authors suggest that this decline is driven by insufficient fulfillment of basic needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness
• Approaches on fostering learning motivation:

• Expectancy-value theory: connecting learning to life outside of school
• Intrest Theory: practices the enhance students autonomy, competence, and relatedness associated with student's interests
• Future Time Perspective: highlight relevance of future goals
• Establishing realistic learner goals
• Foster positive learning emotions like enjoyment and view mistakes as learning opportunities

Math Motivation

• decline in student motivation is most pronounced in the maths
• Women and immigrants tend to experience lower intrsinc motivation for math than males and native-born students

Current Study

Conditions:

• Student/teacher intervention
• Student only intervention
• Control

Hypotheses

1. both intervention groups would see stability/increase in intronic motivation, identified regulation, and self-concept
2. the control group would see a decrease in intronic motivation, identified regulation, and self-concept
3. introjected and external motivation would increase across all groups
4. both treatments would have positive effects compared with the control, and the student/teacher would outperform the student only condition

Sample

Not Randomized Teachers chose which group to be in 22 Math teachers 348 - 7th-grade students

• 134 student-teacher intervention
• 122 student only
• 92 control 17 schools German-speaking Switzerland

Procedure

All Treatment teachers were given 90 minutes of intro training (not d4escribed in the paper) Student interventions occurred during regularly scheduled math classes. Student Intervention: 4 workshops based on the 3 basic needs: relatedness, competence, and autonomy Teacher Intervention: Student/Teacher invention teacher received an additional 2 half-day trainings

Measures

Maths Motivation Self-regulation questioner that evaluates the 4 motivation styles: intrinsic, identified, introjected, external regulation Self-concept of ability in Maths Likert scale questions about math self-concept Maths Achievement Standardized achievement tests Students' perceived support of 3 psych needs Likert scale questions about their perceptions of math teachers' interactions and beliefs about them **Demo Data: Gender/Mitigation staus

Results

There were no pretest differences between groups except for self-concept, in which students in control had the highest, and the student/teacher intervention had the lowest.

Pre- to post-test changes

No sig changes for the control group on any dependent variables (Note that this contradicted their hypotheses as they expected a decrease.) Intrinsic motivation increased for teacher/student and declined for student only Identified Motivation null results for teacher-student, declined for student only Introjected and External Motivation Sig decline for both groups

Intervention Effects

...significant interaction effects on intrinsic and identified motivation were due to an increase in mean scores for students in the combined student/teacher intervention group, whereas students in the student-only group exhibited a decrease in both target variables and students in the control group showed a decrease in intrinsic motivation and maintained identified motivation at a constant level.

• Student/teacher invention group saw a sig greater increase in intrinsic and modified motivation compacted with the decrease experienced by the student only group
• No sig differences in self-concept

Reflection

General thoughts

It is interesting that self-concept was more stable than motivation. Perhaps this is because math self-concept is solidified earlier in students' educational careers, or the measure was not calibrated to detect small changes in math self-concept.

Methods refelctions

The results of the study are talked about as if they are identifying causal effects, but the methods violate the principle of causality because the assignment was not only nonrandom, but they allow the teachers to pic the conditions, which biases the results (It is likely that thee teachers who were most interest in SDT

I would have wanted to see a connection between teacher training and changes in teacher

I also would have wanted to seem more molding that connects the components of the program to student outcomes beyond just group differences. This could have been done using SEM/Path analyses

Causal models Teacher training --> Teacher practices --> student outcomes Student Training --> Student Outcomes

Also, account for class level variation in modeling! The researchers modeled the assignment as if they were student-level variables even though these are class-level variables.

Do you think that if you could have had random assignments, you would have had the same effect? Do you think that the mismatch you found between the teacher/student and student only effects was in part a product of the teacher's prior willingness to consider changing their teaching habits using SDT. Would the teacher interventions have an effect on those who opted out.