Exploring the Role of Students' Experienced Costs in Calculus Courses

• In Event: Understanding Developmental Processes in Students' Math- and Science-Related Expectancy-Value Beliefs: Why Short-Term Assessments Matter

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Framework
Students’ cost perceptions (i.e., what must be given up in order to engage in a task; Eccles et al., 1983) have been shown to negatively predict motivation, course-taking intentions, and achievement (Jiang et al., 2018; Perez et al., 2014); however, students may evaluate costs in different ways. For example, students may form anticipated cost beliefs that impact their academic choices and achievement, but they may also experience costs differently throughout a course due to shifting values or competing demands. The purpose of this study was to examine how students’ experienced cost beliefs function in the classroom. We examined how experienced cost beliefs mediate the relationships between anticipated cost, expectancies, and value and GPA and STEM career intentions. Four dimensions of cost were examined: task effort (TE) cost; outside effort (OE) cost; loss of valued alternatives (LV); and emotional (EM) cost (Flake et al., 2015).

Methods
The sample for this study was taken from three calculus courses (N = 273; table 1). Students completed a pre-survey (i.e., anticipated cost, expectancies, and values) and post-survey (i.e., STEM intentions). Grades were collected from institutional records. Additionally, students completed a daily diary measure for 11 consecutive weeks (i.e., experienced cost). Dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM; Asparouhov et al., 2018) was used to model within- and between-person effects (see Figure 1).

Results
Results suggest that the week-to-week carryover of all four dimensions of experienced cost was significant within- and between-persons. For all four dimensions of cost, those who reported high anticipated cost, also reported high experienced cost and larger variability in experienced cost. For OE and LV cost, those who reported high anticipated cost also had higher GPAs. Students who reported high expectancies reported lower levels of experienced cost, except for TE cost which was not significant. Further, when examining OE cost, students with high expectancies had smaller variability in experienced cost. In all four models of cost, students with high experienced cost had lower GPAs. Finally, we found that experienced cost mediated the relationship between anticipated cost and GPA for all four dimensions of cost and the relationship between expectancies and GPA for OE and LV cost (see Table 2 and Figure 2).

Discussion
Results support the importance of understanding students’ experienced cost. Experienced cost beliefs appear to be malleable throughout the semester. Further, students’ experienced cost beliefs appear to mediate the relationship between anticipated cost and achievement (as well as expectancies and achievement for OE and LV cost). Thus, what happens throughout a course is critical to understanding how cost beliefs contribute to achievement. As high experienced cost beliefs negatively predicted achievement, future intervention work on cost may wish to focus on how to decrease students’ cost beliefs throughout a course rather than at one time point. Our results also support the belief that different dimensions of cost function differently. For example, experienced OE cost was a stronger predictor of achievement than other dimensions. Future research is needed to understand these dimensions in more depth in classroom settings.

Authors

• Patrick Neil Beymer, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Jessica Kay Flake, McGill University

• Jennifer A. Schmidt, Michigan State University