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Describing Teachers’ Instructional Supports for Students’ Motivation: A Qualitative Approach

Fri, April 12, 7:45 to 9:15am, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, Room 115C

Abstract

Purpose & Frameworks
Students’ motivation in STEM, on average, decreases throughout middle school (Wigfield et al., 2012). To address these declines, school contexts can be reframed to more effectively support students’ motivation (e.g., Anderman et al., 2011; Reeve et al., 2022). Most prior research, however, draws from a single motivational theory, which overlooks other potential supports and neglects the overlap in contextual supports for motivation across theories (Linnenbrink-Garcia et al., 2016). The current study demonstrates an approach for analyzing teacher motivation supports in the classroom as they occur in situ.
Specifically, we utilized Linnenbrink-Garcia and colleagues’ (2016) five Motivation Design Principles (MDPs; Belonging, Confidence, Learning Orientation, Autonomy, and Relevance), which integrate across prominent motivational theories, to identify how middle school science teachers can teach in motivationally supportive ways and what actions might thwart student motivation (e.g., Haerens et al., 2016; Patall et al., 2018). We drew upon this integrative approach to: 1) develop an MDP codebook that captures the wide range of supportive and thwarting science instructional practices and 2) discern patterns in those instructional practices.
Method
Participating teachers were part of a larger project in which they attended a multi-day professional learning (PL) program on the MDPs and how to implement them. After the PL, teachers video recorded 5-8 lessons from one of their classes. A purposeful cross sample of 10 teachers was chosen for this qualitative study.
Qualitative analysis consisted of analytical layers of inductive and deductive coding and thematic analysis (Figure 1). Each video was segmented into activities and double-coded for motivationally supportive teacher actions, guided by the apriori MDP codebook. The MDP codebook (Table 1) contains principles for each MDP, with sample supports and thwarts. Thematic analysis involved writing analytical memos for each video and weekly research team meetings where we discussed patterns in teacher instruction.
Results & Significance
We identified support and potential thwarts for student motivation. Common supports included greeting students by name as they entered the classroom (Belonging), displaying and stating clear objectives (Confidence), and connecting the science content to students’ everyday lives (Relevance).
Looking across and within classrooms, we developed several themes surrounding teachers’ impact on students’ motivation (Table 2). For example, cross-cutting effects showed how one action can both support and/or thwart multiple MDPs. This can be seen in the multiple MDPs within a single teacher statement, “These are all really good questions,” which acknowledged students’ perspectives (Autonomy) while also creating a warm, caring environment (Belonging). Other actions supported some MDPs while thwarting others (e.g., students completed assignments from a teacher-determined list of examples rather than a self-developed example), which potentially thwarted relevance and autonomy while supporting confidence by providing clear expectations. The presentation will include additional illustrations of the themes.
Overall, these analyses demonstrate how teacher actions potentially support or thwart multiple facets of student motivation. Additionally, the systematic and integrative nature of the classroom coding provides a structure for other researchers to investigate multiple motivation supports as they occur in real-time.

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