Profiles of adolescents’ motivation in mathematics and their relations to academic outcomes: A cross-national study

• In Event: Dissertation Workshops 8 &10 and Publication Workshop 5
  In Paper Session: Dissertation Workshop 10: Media Literacy, Mathematics and Science Education (by invitation only)

Abstract

A producing a new generation of well-educated and competitive Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professions represents critical determinants of the countries’ economic growth in future. Thus, the recruitment and retention of adolescents in future STEM professions has been considered as one of the most prevailing issues facing current nationwide education systems. With focus on the mathematic area, the ultimate purpose of the current study is to examine what motivates adolescents to excel in math and to willingly pursue mathematics in the future.
Over fifty years of academic motivation research, especiaylly Eccles et al.’s expectancy-value model of academic choice (Eccles et al., 1983), demonstrates that individual’s goals, values, and competence beliefs directly influence on academic behaviors (e.g., math achievement or math-driven career choices) and these motivational beliefs are shaped by developmental, situational, and cultural influences. However, recent cross-cultural studies have suggested that the relation between motivation beliefs and academic behaviors might not be straightforward across nations. For example, East Asian students, who perform relatively high on international tests, tend to view their competence in math more poorly than do students in lower-performing countries such as the U.S. This is contrary to the traditional theoretical prediction that individual's competence beliefs lead to higher motivation and thus to positive learning outcomes (Zimmerman & Schunk, 1989). Thus, this study adds to existing educational and psychological literature by providing a portrait of how the relations between motivational beliefs and academic choices are understood using a comparison between U.S. and Korean samples (i.e., a cross-cultural approach) as well as advanced methodologies (i.e., a person-centered approach).
The study attempts to extend the original Eccles’ expectancy-value model in three different ways. First, there are distinct motivational beliefs in the original model: math self-concept (feeling efficacious in math), math interest (feeling interested in math), math utility value (perception of the usefulness in math for obtaining future goals) and math anxiety (fear of failure in math). The current model assumes that motivation beliefs may be connected in equally adaptive but different ways for different individuals. That is, different adolescents are characterized by different combinations of such motivational constructs in mathematics which operate as a coherent whole. Employing a person-centered approach, the current study attempts to uncover subgroups that share similar motivational patterns in math and to investigate what characterize these groups with respect to math-related choices.
Second, Eccles et al.’s original model has been popularly applied to the U.S. students and generalized fairly well across students in Western society such as Canada, Australia, and Germany (e.g., Nagy et al., 2010; Watt, Eccles, & Durik, 2006). There are limited studies conducted with non-Western sample, especially East Asian students under collectivistic culture norms. The current study employs a cross-cultural perspective in order to provide to better understand the relations between motivational characteristics in math and math achievement. By comparing the U.S and Korea, the hypothesized model is explored to answer the following questions: Does the considerable consistency in students’ motivation profiles across the nations exist? Or are there any certain motivation profiles that are more dominant in a nation? Are there are consistent relations between motivational profiles and academic behaviors across different cultural contexts?
Third, the current model employs the hypothesized paths that motivational profiles in math have influenced on adolescents’ math achievement, and thus affect willingness to pursue math in the future in the form of taking additional math classes and having math-driven career aspirations. The results are expected to show whether doing well in math at high school plays a milestone of the pathway to STEM-related educational planning and aspirations.
The model is assessed using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 data, which were collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. PISA is a cross-national assessment of reading, mathematics and science skills of 15-year-old students within an internationally agreed upon framework. This dissertation has been not reached the stage of analysis, thus, the results and conclusions cannot be provided.
The current study is expected to inform international educators and policymakers on the desirability of different configurations of motivation and the synergy among these dimensions of motivation to create and support interest in STEM fields.
I am currently a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel hill and fully expect to have a dissertation proposal meeting at middle of January. My dissertation faculty advisor is Dr. Judith Meece, a Professor in the program of Applied Developmental Sciences & Special Education.

Author

• Hyeyoung Hwang, University of North Carolina at Chapel hill