Changes in high‐school students' competence beliefs, utility value and achievement goals in mathematics

Roch Chouinard · Normand Roy

135 citations0/0 files storedBritish Journal of Educational Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Education, Achievement, and Giftedness Mathematics Education and Pedagogy School Choice and Performance

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Many studies have revealed that there is a significant decrease over time in high-school students' attitudes towards mathematics learning. Some authors conclude that motivation in mathematics stabilizes or improves around grade 9; others propose that the decline is continuous. It is unclear if girls or boys are more affected by this phenomenon. AIMS: The present study aims to further examine changes in competence beliefs, utility value and achievement goals in mathematics during high school, taking gender and period of the academic year into account. SAMPLE: 1,130 participants from 18 secondary schools, distributed in two cohorts (grades 7 and 9). METHOD: Attitudinal scales designed to measure competence beliefs, utility value and achievement goals in mathematics were administered at the beginning and end of three academic years in a longitudinal cohort-sequential research design using two sequential cohorts. Hierarchical linear modelling was used to analyse the data. RESULTS: Results showed an ongoing reduction of most of the variables measured. This was the case for both cohorts and genders. However, boys were more affected than girls. Furthermore, for all variables, motivation tended to be lower at the end of the academic year than at the beginning. CONCLUSIONS: Our results support the hypothesis of a regular decline of motivation in mathematics during high school, accentuated between grades 9 and 11. Moreover, our results illustrate gender convergence in mathematics rather than gender differentiation. Finally, the gradual drop in motivation in mathematics appears to be a two-step phenomenon: a decrease between and within grade levels.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 135 citations exist upstream.

References

2001A 2 × 2 achievement goal framework.1982The Perceived Competence Scale for Children 1934A Handbook of Child Psychology 2002Changes in Children’s Self-Competence and Values: Gender and Domain Differences across Grades One through Twelve 1995Contemporary Educational Psychology 2002Children's competence and value beliefs from childhood through adolescence: Growth trajectories in two male-sex-typed domains.1987Gender Roles and Women's Achievement-Related Decisions 1977Sex-Related Differences in Mathematics Achievement, Spatial Visualization and Affective Factors

Cited by

2012Teacher Beliefs as Predictors of Adolescents’ Cognitive Engagement and Achievement in Mathematics 2019The More Interest, the Less Effort Cost Perception and Effort Avoidance 2020Positive attitudes towards mathematics and science are mutually beneficial for student achievement: a latent profile analysis of TIMSS 2015 2019Towards an Understanding of STEM Engagement: a Review of the Literature on Motivation and Academic Emotions 2021Students’ motivational trajectories and academic success in math-intensive study programs: Why short-term motivational assessments matter.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.