Abstract
We report on 71 Norwegian freshmen engineering students' self-efficacy and motivation in mathematics. Students' responses to five-point Likert scales were analysed across three groups corresponding to different performance levels on a set of mathematical tasks. The groups were investigated to trace differences in self-efficacy, motivation, and the epistemological beliefs about the nature of mathematics. Results show that the Norwegian first-year engineering students' self-efficacy is closely related to task performance, but there is not a similar correspondence between task performance and the motivational values. The amount of higher performing students who regard mathematics as a set of (ready-made) tools for solving tasks is a little higher than the amount of lower performing students, while in the case of valuing problem-solving processes in mathematics, the distribution of students is opposite with lower performing students being a majority. The task performance levels are a significant predictor of how dynamic the distribution of the epistemological beliefs is.
Highlights
Mathematics courses are a fundamental part of every engineering study program
In addition to investigating students' motivation, we examine engineering students’ views of mathematics in terms of certain orientations, i.e., the epistemological beliefs about the nature
We focus on investigating how Norwegian students at various task performance levels differ from one another in self-efficacy, motivation, and with respect to their orientations, while our previous studies focused on surveying at somewhat more general level what kind of relations there are between motivation, self-efficacy, task performance and students' distributions of orientations
Summary
Engineering students are confronted with substantial amounts of mathematics even if they have not chosen their course of studies for that reason Rather, it is the other way around; in the study by Harris, Black, Hernandez-Martinez, Pepin and Williams (2015), very few students were aware of the demands on studying mathematics when starting their studies. Our investigation can be taken as a sequel to the study by Nortvedt and Siqveland (2018) While they consider only the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for mathematics of both engineering and calculus students, our range of motivational values is more distinctive and we focus only on engineering students. The result section is followed by a discussion of our findings and conclusions
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