Abstract
The primary purpose of this study was to examine whether students’ motivation-related perceptions of mathematics courses were related to their ratings of instruction while controlling for their academic major, type of math class, and expected grade in the class. We investigated these relationships at both the student- and class-level because little is known about whether students’ motivation-related perceptions vary across mathematics courses and whether this variance is related to overall class ratings of instruction. The sample included 795 students nested within 43 different mathematics course sections. Students provided their course perceptions of autonomy, utility value, expectancies for success, situational interest, instructor caring, expected grade, and their overall perceptions of the course and instructor. Multilevel modeling techniques were used to investigate potential student- and class-level effects as well as compositional effects. Students’ class perceptions varied significantly across mathematics courses. In addition, students’ motivation-related course perceptions were positively related to their instructor and course ratings at both the student-level and class-level; however, the strength of these relationships sometimes varied across courses for some of the motivation-related perceptions. These results suggest that the motivational climate (i.e., the psychological environment) can affect students’ instructor and course ratings. Moreover, these findings suggest that instructors have some control over their instructor and course ratings through the teaching strategies that they implement. For example, they may be able to increase their ratings by implementing teaching strategies that support students’ autonomy, goals, success, interests, and relationships.
Highlights
Students’ perceptions in a mathematics class are important because these perceptions can affect their motivation and engagement in the class, and subsequently, their learning and achievement (Middleton and Jansen, 2011; Christenson et al, 2012; Middleton et al, 2017)
We examined the dimensionality of each of the five factors separately by conducting a separate principal components analysis for each factor along with a Velicer’s minimum average partial (MAP) test and a parallel analysis
We investigated the effects of the type
Summary
Students’ perceptions in a mathematics class are important because these perceptions can affect their motivation and engagement in the class, and subsequently, their learning and achievement (Middleton and Jansen, 2011; Christenson et al, 2012; Middleton et al, 2017). Scholars have questioned whether student ratings of instruction are accurate measures quality (Kulik, 2001; Theall and Franklin, 2001; Carpenter et al, 2020), student ratings remain important at many institutions because they are often used for personnel decisions, such as annual reviews, merit raises, and promotion decisions (Miller and Seldin, 2014). These ratings have serious consequences for instructors (Linse, 2017; Stroebe, 2020). If students’ success beliefs about a course are more important for nonmathematics majors than majors, instructors of those courses could identify teaching strategies that focus on success perceptions
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