Is students’ learning being affected by teachers? - Thoonen et al. - Article


In many countries a decrease in motivation for school is been seen in secondary education. It has been thought that this can be explained by a poor integration of the students’ personal world into the school environment. This causes students to not identify with their school and eventually leads to a decreased motivation. The present study focuses on examining the importance of teachers’ instructions and efficacy beliefs.

Previous research has made a distinction between motivational behaviour (investment in school and academic achievement) and motivational factors. Motivational factors usually consists of three components. The first component is affective, which consists of the feeling and emotional reaction to the school. The second component is expectancy, which includes the students’ academic self-efficacy. The final component, value, grasps the concept of students’ beliefs about the importance of a task and interest in a task. This is essentially on the students’ goals for performing a task. Students’ can either be mastery-oriented (school tasks are perceived as a challenge) or performance-avoidant oriented (trying to avoid unfavourable judgements on competence).
Distinctions have also been made between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is about doing an activity because you want to, extrinsic motivation is more about doing an activity because it will lead you to a desired outcome.

It is been thought that four aspects of teaching affect students’ motivational behaviour and factors.

  1. Process-oriented instruction: the external control of the learning process by teachers gradually shifts to an internal control by students. This facilities independent learning.

  2. Differentation: teachers should differentiate in their instructions according to differences in social, cultural and cognitive characteristics.

  3. Connection to the students’ world: learning should be considered as a situated activity in which it is linked to the social and cultural context. This enhances the chance that students’ will practice skills that they can use in their everyday life and not just at school.

  4. Cooperative learning: social exchanges between students increase student achievement by exchanging ideas and opinions with each other.

Combined with these aspects of teaching, teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs can also influence students’ motivation. A high sense of self-efficacy is associated with more creativity and more intensive efforts in helping students that might have problems performing. It is also associated with more planning and better organisation and a willingness to experiment with new ideas and methods. A high sense of self-efficacy has therefore a positive effect on students’ motivation.

The study

Teachers of 34 primary schools situated in the south and east of the Netherlands participated in this study. In total, 621 teachers and 3462 students filled in the questionnaire. The questionnaire included existing measures on motivational behaviour and factors, classroom practices and teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. Three regression analyses investigated the hypothesis that the effect of teacher efficacy on student motivation is mediated by teachers’ teaching. School year and students’ sex were included as a control variable.

Results

Results show that the teachers participating in this study had moderate self-efficacy beliefs and scored high on the four aspects of teaching, especially on process-oriented instruction. This might be caused by biased data, because teacher were asked to assess their own teaching and might have drawn a too positive picture. Students who participated scored high on both motivational behaviour and motivational factors. As noticed above, three regression analyses were conducted. The first analyses showed that there were no significant effects of teachers’ self-efficacy on student motivation, expect for the effect on well-being in school. The second analyses found significant effects between teacher efficacy and all teaching practices, indicating that highly effective teachers seemed to use more classroom practises based on new conceptions of learning. The third analyses showed that the control variables (school year and gender) affected most of the student motivation variables. Older students scored lower on well-being in school, intrinsic motivation, mastery goals, performance avoidance and school investment, and higher on well-being in class compared to younger students. Girls scores higher on performance avoidance and well-being in school, but lower on academic efficacy and mastery goals. It also showed that the more a teacher used process-oriented instruction, fewer students reported high well-being in both class and school. These findings were contrary to earlier findings, where increasing self-regulation seemed to have a positive effect on students’ motivation. A possible explanation for this finding might be a relative large number of students with learning or other disabilities or the quality of the teaching itself. Overall this study supports that there is an effect of teaching on students’ motivation to learn. These effects were however small.

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