Academic Success Skills: Motivation and Interest
Motivation refers to the needs, desires, or purposes an individual seeks to satisfy through his or her engagement, and involves the individual’s situational and personal interests and goal orientations (Middleton et al., 2017). Because mathematical inquiry requires high levels of engagement, an instructor’s commitment to supporting students’ mathematical learning through inquiry requires fostering their development of needs, desires, and/or purposes that make such engagement possible.
Faculty at the MIP Academic Success Skills Initiation Workshop in May, 2019 recommended that instructional resources developed by CoRDs and ARCs addressing Motivation and Interest for success in the Oklahoma entry-level college math pathways should:
1. Define motivation and interest in terms of their cognitive and affective components.
2. Review and synthesize the research literature to identify the types of experiences required to promote students’ interest in mathematics and to foster their motivation to learn mathematics through inquiry.
3. Propose specific principles of curriculum design and instructional practice (including assessment practice) to promote students’ interest in mathematics and to foster their motivation to learn mathematics through inquiry.
4. Describe the potential affordances of the MIP focus on promoting students’ active engagement and leveraging meaningful applications for promoting students’ interest in mathematics and fostering their motivation to learn mathematics.
Suggested Resources
Eccles, J. S., & Wigfield, A. (2002). Motivational beliefs, values, and goals. Annual Review of Psychology, 53(1), 109–132.
Eccles and Wigfield provide a comprehensive review of theoretical contributions and empirical findings from research on motivation, beliefs, values, and goals. This resource is most useful for describing the cognitive basis of students’ motivation and interests and their relation to other categories of affect.
Hannula, M. S. (2006). Motivation in mathematics: Goals reflected in emotions. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 63, 165–178.
Hannula offers a conceptualization of motivation that emphasizes its situational characteristics and establishes its relation to goal structures and the unconscious mechanisms that control emotion. Hannula describes three aspects of motivation regulation and presents a case study to illustrate and support the conception of motivation he offers. This resource is most relevant to addressing focus (1) above.
Middleton, J. A., & Spanias, P. (1999). Motivation for achievement in mathematics: Findings, generalizations, and criticisms of the recent research. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 30(1), 65–88.
Middleton and Spanias examine research on motivation in mathematics education to identify a set of generalizable conclusions. Based on their review of the literature, the authors identify potential extensions of motivation theory and offer research recommendations. This resource is most relevant to addressing foci (1), (2), and (3) above.
Middleton, J. A., & Jansen, A. (2011). Motivation matters and interest counts: Fostering engagement in mathematics. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
In this book, Middleton and Jansen provide a non-technical introduction to motivation in mathematics education for practitioners. They discuss the fundamental principles of student motivation, emphasizing its learned, adaptive, momentary, and social qualities. The authors also discuss several strategies for fostering students’ motivation to learn mathematics. This comprehensive resource is relevant to addressing all foci above.