The present dissertation investigates the unfolding of students’ motivation in the natural classroom setting. School can be an inspiring place where students are confronted by subjects or tasks that arouse their inherent joy or curiosity. School typically comprises subjects and tasks that are all meant to facilitate students to become mature and self-determined members of society but that are simultaneously not always in every students’ scope of interest. Addition-ally, empirical findings have consistently shown that students’ motivation follows a steady decline during secondary education, which is particularly pronounced in the domain of math (e.g., Gaspard et al., 2017; Jacobs et al., 2002; Watt, 2004). Hence, it is of high relevance to investigate conditions under which students can motivate themselves in the educational con-text, particularly in the domain of math. This dissertation is based on situated expectancy-value theory (Eccles et al., 1983; Eccles & Wigfield, 2020) and conceptualizes students’ motivation as a function of the person and the person’s environment. Substantiated by self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2020), the present dissertation brings the ontogeny of motivation in relation to the educational context to the fore. More precisely, in the present dissertation, I explicitly focus on the educational context with respect to indicators of teaching quality during math class (namely, motivational teaching behaviors) in relation to students’
motivation to do math.
Adding to previous research at the intersection of motivational science and research on teaching quality, namely, on the impact of motivational teaching behaviors on students’ moti-vation, the present dissertation aims to improve the understanding of how motivational teach-ing behaviors come into effect in the natural classroom settteach-ing and more precisely durteach-ing math class. In this light, I raised three key substantive questions for current and future research at the intersection of motivational science and research on teaching quality, which I aim to address within the scope of this dissertation. These three key substantive questions are How consistent
are motivational teaching behaviors?, What are the antecedents of motivational teaching be-haviors?, and What are other external sources that target students’ motivation and tend to accompany motivational teaching behaviors in the educational setting?
Drawing on interest theories, control-value theory, and self-determination theory, I laid out starting points from which these three questions could be approached and that could even-tually facilitate a better understanding of the unfolding of students’ motivation in the natural classroom setting. First, drawing on interest theories (e.g., Krapp et al., 1992), the understand-ing of the consistency of motivational teachunderstand-ing behaviors could be substantiated by examinunderstand-ing the stability and situation specificity of motivational teaching behaviors and student motiva-tion, as well as their situation-specific relation (see also 1.3.1). Second, drawing on control-value theory (e.g., Pekrun, 2000), the understanding of what affects motivational teaching be-haviors could be substantiated by examining teacher motivation as an antecedent of motiva-tional teaching behaviors as laid out in the concept of value transmission (see also 1.3.2). Fi-nally, drawing again on self-determination theory (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 1985), a better under-standing of other external impacts on students’ motivation in the educational setting that ac-company motivational teaching behaviors could be facilitated by examining joint effects of motivational teaching behaviors and externally imposed relevance interventions because they both capitalize on the concepts of need support and self-relevance. Such an investigation would provide insights into whether relevance interventions can boost or at least compensate for (a lack of) motivational teaching behaviors (see also 1.3.3).
Taken together, the current dissertation is aimed at substantiating the understanding of students’ motivation as framed by SEVT by examining the impact of motivational teaching behaviors during math class and by addressing three substantive and related questions for the current research located at the intersection of motivational science and teaching quality (namely, the stability of motivation and motivational teaching behaviors, antecedents of moti-vational teaching behaviors, and the joint impacts of motimoti-vational teaching behaviors and a relevance intervention during math class). To address the key substantive questions in the pre-sent dissertation, I build upon three empirical studies:
In Study 1, titled The “situative nature” of competence and value beliefs and the pre-dictive power of autonomy support: A multilevel investigation of repeated observations, the situative nature of students’ expectancies and values as well as their susceptibility to time-consistent and occasion-specific factors of motivational teaching behaviors is investigated.
Based on data from the MoMa 2 study (Gaspard et al., 2020; Piesch et al., 2020) comprising
repeated observations from five consecutive math lessons, we apply multilevel modeling, first, to investigate the stability of motivational teaching behaviors as well as expectancies and val-ues and whether their empirical features correspond to their theoretical definition (Eccles &
Wigfield, 2020); and second, to examine the predictive power of time-consistent and occasion-specific factors of motivational teaching behaviors for students’ expectancies and values.
In Study 2, titled The transmission of values from math teachers to their ninth-grade students: Different mechanisms for different value dimensions?, the prospective associations between teachers’ motivation, teachers’ motivational teaching behaviors, and students’ moti-vation are examined. Using data from the MoMa 2 study (Gaspard et al., 2020; Piesch et al., 2020), this study examines the transferability and generalizability of the value transmission concept to the construct of motivation and thus investigates teachers’ motivation as an ante-cedent of their motivational teaching behaviors during class. With the goal of investigating whether teachers can “transmit” their motivation to their students, a broad spectrum of teacher and student values as well as of motivational teaching behaviors is the focus of this study.
In Study 3, titled Gleiche Wirkung in jedem Klassenzimmer? Moderationseffekte durch motivationale Unterrichtspraktiken am Beispiel einer Nützlichkeitsintervention im Mathema-tikunterricht und damit einhergehende Herausforderungen [Same effect in every classroom?
Treatment by moderator effects of a relevance intervention as a function of motivational teach-ing practices, and methodological challenges], the joint effects of motivational teachteach-ing be-haviors during regular class and an exemplary relevance intervention (MoMa 1; Brisson et al., 2017; Gaspard, Dicke, Flunger, Brisson, et al., 2015) on students’ motivation and achievement are investigated. This study thus addresses the question of “seed” and “soil” (Walton & Yeager, 2020). It simultaneously provides insights into whether external factors that influence students’
motivation other than motivational teaching behaviors can operate as boosters of or compen-sators for (a lack of) motivational teaching behaviors that students are frequently exposed to in class. Study 3 particularly addresses these questions while taking into consideration the statis-tical power of typical motivation intervention studies.
In the field of educational psychology, researchers are typically confronted with a hier-archical structure of their observations (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002). More precisely, students are typically nested within learning groups, classes, teachers, schools, or even districts. All of the three empirical studies in this dissertation are conducted in educational settings in which a natural clustering of the data occurs (namely, students nested in classes). Thus, in all of the studies, both the analytical level of the individual student and of the class are simultaneously
taken into account by means of multilevel modeling (Hamaker & Muthén, 2019; Raudenbush
& Bryk, 2002; Snijders & Bosker, 1999; Stapleton, McNeish, et al., 2016). In line with the overarching goal of the present dissertation, special attention is given to the impact of the en-vironment on students’ motivation (Lüdtke et al., 2009; Marsh et al., 2012; Stapleton, Yang, et al., 2016).