Changes to students’ motivation to learn science

Abstract

Studies that investigated the relations between the environment and students’ motivation to engage with science have typically looked at the state of students’ motivation at a given time and its relations with the environment. This study took a different perspective; it looked at the changes to students’ motivation to engage with science that occurred over a school year and investigated what drove these changes. According to goal orientation theory, students typically shift their personal goal orientations towards their perceptions of the goal emphases of their environment. For example, if students perceive their science teachers as highly emphasizing mastery orientation, they are likely to become more mastery oriented towards science with time. However, different environmental influences, such as parents, peer, teachers, and general school culture, push and pull the students in different directions. Using survey data gathered from Israeli adolescents that came from low SES backgrounds, we demonstrated that any shift in students’ mastery orientation towards science was not related to their perceptions of the environmental emphases, but rather to the differences they perceived between the environment and themselves. In addition, we identified which environmental influences were stronger predictors of shifts in students’ mastery orientation towards science. These results help to clarify the influence of the environment on students’ motivation to engage with science, can help understand why interventions may sometimes lead to counter-intuitive results, and can provide the basis for a model that may be useful for predicting how students’ motivation for science may change over a school year.