The Stability of Maths Motivation

The second main focus of Study 1 was how maths motivation develops across time. Major theories of academic motivation imply that attitudes and behaviours towards learning have a lasting effect and much research discusses the importance of tracking academic motivation across time. However, models of academic motivation tend to be concurrent, rather than longitudinal. This means that few have addressed the stability of motivation (Schunk, 2000) and that predictions about the relationships between motivational constructs generally address associations within the same time- frame. Consequently, the current study first tested the stability of each motivational facet across the one-year interval. Then due to the lack of established theory, an exploratory analysis was performed on the longitudinal relationships amongst constructs within the model.

As expected, all constructs were significantly and positively related to their Time 1 counterparts. Each of these paths reflected strong stability coefficients, suggesting that mathematics motivation tends to be stable, with fairly moderate year to year fluctuations. In contrast to Wigfield et al. (1997), the adaptive cognitions shared similar levels of stability. Although mastery orientation appeared more stable than utility value, this was not a substantial difference. Also in contrast to their findings regarding self-efficacy, the current study found similar stability for self-efficacy and intrinsic interest. This difference in findings may be because Wigfield et al.’s (1997) sample consisted of primary school students, while the current study involved high school students. The stability of both ability and value beliefs tends to increase with age (Eccles et al., 1984; Stipek & Mac Iver, 1989; Wigfield et al., 1997). Compared to primary school, by high school perhaps students are more consistent in which activities they enjoy and their self-perceptions of competence in specific contexts. According to Wigfield et al. (1997) slightly lower stability for utility values may be expected because students receive less consistent information about the relevance of maths from various sources including parents, teachers and peers throughout the year. However, more stable perceptions of competency and enjoyment may arise because students frequently receive explicit and implicit feedback about their performance.

Looking at other components in the model, the current study found stronger stability coefficients for anxiety than previous research has reported. For example, Ma and Xu (2004) tracked high school students from grades 7 to 12 and observed stability coefficients ranging from .39 to .57, which are lower than the current model’s value. This difference in strength may be due to the dimension of anxiety focused on in the two studies. The current measure concerned the cognitive element of anxiety, whereas Ma and Xu (2004) had two items assessing negative affective reactions to maths. Rather than conflicting, when considered together these results may indicate that the tendency to worry about going well in maths is more stable across time than experiencing negative emotions such as fear or nervousness. Perhaps such worry is less context dependant and not always attributable to maths per se but is more associated with a student’s personality tendencies.

The current pattern of stability coefficients did not support expectations based on previous findings addressing the subject-specificity of the MES-HS constructs. Green et al. (2007) found that ratings of anxiety, planning and task orientation were relatively strongly correlated across English, maths and science, while valuing and

disengagement were more context-dependent. Although the current study found anxiety and mastery orientation had slightly higher stability over the one-year interval, planning did not. Furthermore, Green et al. found that uncertain control and failure avoidance showed fairly strong cross-domain generality, however these did show greater stability in the current study. This inconsistency between the stability results and cross-sectional research on domain generality reveal the nature of motivation. Although some facets of academic motivation may have similar concurrent ratings across disciplines, these same facets are not necessarily the most stable across time.

While the current study showed individual facets of motivation to be fairly consistent overtime and to share a similar level of stability, a second question also asked how different facets within the model relate to each other longitudinally. The exploratory analysis addressing this question showed only failure avoidance at Time 2 to be significantly predicted by previous motivational experiences. This is despite expectations that self-efficacy would play a major role in shaping future motivation, particularly of intrinsic, utility and anxiety beliefs (Meece et al., 1990). Social cognitive theory presents self-efficacy as a driving force influencing how students perceive and react to learning activities. However, the exploratory analysis conducted for this study showed no longitudinal evidence of this influence. Furthermore, although previous research has found that university students’ persistence in maths predicts their mastery values and feeling of control one-year later (Martin et al., 2003), the current post hoc analysis did not support this trend either when the stability of all motivation factors was accounted for.

The additional paths to Time 2 failure avoidance derived from Time 1 valuing and mastery orientation. Failure avoidance was positively predicted by valuing,

whereas it was negatively predicted by mastery focus. This indicates that students who believed learning maths was relevant to their future risked developing a work

because students pre-occupied with gaining an external reward use judgements from others as sources of reassurance. Consequently, although EVT presents utility values as a positive motivator, the current results demonstrate that its extrinsic nature has the potential to encourage maladaptive motivation in the long-term. However, students who enjoyed maths and gained satisfaction from it were less likely to develop a fearful orientation. This may be because their focus is on the intrinsic enjoyment they gain from learning. Students with a mastery orientation also tend to associate performance with effort rather than ability (Ames, 1992). This means that they are less likely to be concerned with others’ judgements of their competence. Consequently, these results suggest that intrinsic interest can act as a buffer to potentially stressful evaluative events and judgements. This highlights the role of values in need achievement, self- worth and goal theories, as a fear of failure appeared to be influenced by which type of values students associated with a task.

The current results also indicated that the stability of failure avoidance varied somewhat year-to-year, particularly when students’ prior values were taken into account. From a practical perspective this is good news for educators as a failure avoidant tendency may be fairly malleable compared to other constructs such as anxiety or self-efficacy. Perhaps enhancing students’ feelings of interest and

satisfaction from learning maths, with a balanced perspective of its usefulness may lead to less failure avoidance in the future.

Overall, the tests of stability indicated that there was some degree of consistency in students’ experiences across time. Despite previous findings that the mean level of motivation tends to fluctuate within the school year (Chouinard & Roy, 2008; Mac Iver et al., 1991), particularly before stressful periods such as exams (Smith, 2004), the current study showed that longer term maths motivation was fairly stable. This means that a student’s ranking in maths motivation relative to others was fairly consistent one-year later. The interpretation of this as positive or negative depends on the individual. If a student has stronger self-efficacy compared to other students, this is promising as they are likely to maintain a similar advantage one-year later. However if a student has comparatively weaker competency beliefs, the stability coefficients

stability values were not so high as to suggest there was not any individual movement within the group.

5.5 Theoretical Evaluation of Associations within the Student Motivation and