Abstract
This longitudinal study examined the relations between teacher enthusiasm, supportive instructional practices, and students’ mastery goal orientation and behavioral engagement in mathematics. All variables were assessed by means of student reports. A total of 751 9th and 10th grade secondary school students from 46 mathematics classrooms were presented with questionnaires at the beginning (Time 1) and the middle of the school year (Time 2). Structural equation analyses revealed that student-perceived teacher enthusiasm at Time 1 predicted student-perceived support for autonomy, competence, social relatedness, and subject matter relevance at Time 2. Student-perceived support for autonomy and social relatedness (Time 2) were related to students’ mastery goal orientation and their behavioral engagement (Time 2). Moreover, student-perceived teacher enthusiasm (Time 1) indirectly predicted students’ mastery goal orientation (Time 2) via student-perceived support for social relatedness and autonomy (Time 2). The findings contribute to research aimed at identifying teacher characteristics and instructional processes that promote student motivation.
Highlights
As outlined in the preceding sections, previous research showed that teacher enthusiasm is significantly associated with instructional practices, in particular with practices referring to student support (Kunter et al, 2008, 2011, 2013; Praetorius et al, 2018)
In order to examine whether the group of students who dropped out after Time 1 (n = 366) differed significantly from the current sample of 751 students, we compared the mean values of all study variables between the two groups by means of two-tailed t–tests
The present study examined a longitudinal indirect effects model that hypothesized significant relations of teacher enthusiasm to various supportive instructional practices, which in turn were assumed to be related to students’ mastery goal orientation and behavioral engagement in mathematics
Summary
Which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any Shibaz, 2014; Fauth et al, 2019; Kunter et al, 2013; Lazarides et al, 2018; Schiefele, 2017; medium, provided the original author Schiefele & Schaffner, 2015). Supportive instructional practices, such as the provision of autonomy, competence, social relatedness, and subject matter relevance, were found to play a crucial role for students’ motivation to learn (Lazarides & Rubach, 2017; Rakoczy et al, 2008; Theis et al, 2020) or class-related emotions (Cui et al, 2017) Despite these positive findings, there are three noteworthy deficits of previous research: First, with only a few exceptions (e.g., Kunter et al, 2013; Lazarides & Rubach, 2017), most previous studies were cross-sectional. In order to examine these questions, students had to rate their mastery goals and behavioral engagement and their teachers’ enthusiasm and four different aspects of teacher-provided support: support for autonomy, competence, social relatedness, and subject matter relevance (teaching for meaning). Preliminary evidence provided by Kunter et al (2008, 2011, 2013) and Lazarides and Rubach (2017) supports our suggestion
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