Does teacher motivation lead to student motivation? The mediating role of teaching behavior

Abstract

The overarching purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of teacher motivation on teaching behavior and student motivation. The notion of teacher motivation refers to teachers' interests, self-efficacy, and mastery goals orientation. Teaching behavior comprises of mastery-oriented and cognitively activating instructional practices, however, student motivation represents students' interest in subject matter and student mastery-goals orientation. Data were collected from students (n=434) from public sector elementary schools located in the Punjab province of Pakistan, where students were nested within teachers (n=89). Considering the multilevel nature of the data, multilevel analysis was used to test the hypothesized relationship between the constructs. The findings suggest that all facets of teacher motivation are antecedents of instructional practices as well as student motivation. Being a component of teaching behavior, instructional practices (only mastery-oriented) have strong positive links with student motivation suggesting that mastery oriented instructional practices involve a caring attitude towards students' interests and learning which in turn result in enhanced motivation among students. Moreover, beyond the direct positive association between teacher motivation and student motivation, mastery-oriented instructional practices also mediate the effect of teacher motivation.