Abstract
Educators and government administrators are keen to find interventions to change the rapidly declining enrollments in senior high school mathematics. In 2012, PISA introduced measures to examine the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), a prominent theory from social psychology for encouraging changes in behavior (and perhaps mathematics enrollments). This paper sought to examine the applicability of the TPB for predicting the relationship between students’ intentions, their mathematics attitudes, subject norms, perceived controllability and self-efficacy as well as their mathematics behaviour, using items created by PISA 2012 question designers to assess these TPB constructs. Australian PISA 2012 data from 14,481 students found that the hypothesized TPB antecedents for studying mathematics were very poor predictors of mathematical intentions and indirectly, weak predictors of mathematical behaviour. The Attitudes factor i.e. an interest in mathematics, was found to be the strongest predictor of mathematical intentions. The poor predictive capacity of the TPB was proposed to have been due to ill-defined indicator items in the PISA 2012 measuring instruments, which did not comply with the TPB’s principles of compatibility and aggregation. Future studies testing the TPB in the context of studying mathematics would benefit from undertaking Elicitation studies to identify appropriate TPB antecedents and indicators of the mathematics behaviour being targeted.
Highlights
In Australia, the number of school students choosing mathematics has been in apparent rapid decline
Australian PISA 2012 data from 14,481 students found that the hypothesized Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) antecedents for studying mathematics were very poor predictors of mathematical intentions and indirectly, weak predictors of mathematical behaviour
Antecedent factors i.e. attitudes, subjective norms, perceived controllability and self-efficacy, as well as measures of mathematical intentions and behaviour were examined as one factor congeneric models prior to being placed in the TPB model
Summary
In Australia, the number of school students choosing mathematics has been in apparent rapid decline. Forgasz (2006b) suggested that the decline in intermediate and advanced mathematics enrollments could be due to the variation in student expectations of different courses. Kennedy, Lyons and Quinn (2014) indicated that the Australian student enrollment rate in entry mathematics had been steadily increasing over the past 20 years, but that the enrollment rate in intermediate and advanced mathematics was almost the reverse image of entry mathematics. Other studies such as that by Lyons and Quinn (2010) and Thomas (2000) advised that diversification of curriculum offerings was likely to be another account for the declines
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