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Teachers’ Mastery Goals: Using a Self-Report Survey to Study the Relations between Teaching Practices and Students’ Motivation for Science Learning

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Abstract

Employing achievement goal theory (Ames Journal of Educational psychology, 84(3), 261–271, 1992), we explored science teachers’ instruction and its relation to students’ motivation for science learning and school culture. Based on the TARGETS framework (Patrick et al. The Elementary School Journal, 102(1), 35–58, 2001) and using data from 95 teachers, we developed a self-report survey assessing science teachers’ usage of practices that emphasize mastery goals. We then used this survey and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses to study the relations between 35 science teachers’ mastery goals in each of the TARGETS dimensions, the decline in their grade-level 5–8 students’ (N = 1.356) classroom and continuing motivation for science learning, and their schools’ mastery goal structure. The findings suggest that adolescents’ declining motivation for science learning results in part from a decreasing emphasis on mastery goals by schools and science teachers. Practices that relate to the nature of tasks and to student autonomy emerged as most strongly associated with adolescents’ motivation and its decline with age.

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Notes

  1. In cognitive pretesting, interviewees were asked to read each item out loud, explain what it means, choose a score for it, and explain why they chose this score, providing concrete examples. In this way, we were able to find out whether they understood the items as we intended them to be understood and whether we understood their scorings as they meant them.

  2. Because of the way overall mastery goals was calculated, it was weighted toward the Task and Time scales.

  3. Correlations between the different outcome variables were lower than 0.7. See Table 3.

  4. The relation between students’ perceptions of their teachers’ mastery goals and their perceptions of the school’s mastery structure has been reported elsewhere (Vedder-Weiss and Fortus 2013).

  5. An alternative interpretation for the insignificant relations between Grouping practices and students’ outcomes is the low model fit this scale obtained by the CFA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel

    Dana Vedder-Weiss

  2. Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, P.O.B 26, 76100, Rehovot, Israel

    David Fortus

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  1. Dana Vedder-Weiss
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  2. David Fortus
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Correspondence to Dana Vedder-Weiss.

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Vedder-Weiss, D., Fortus, D. Teachers’ Mastery Goals: Using a Self-Report Survey to Study the Relations between Teaching Practices and Students’ Motivation for Science Learning. Res Sci Educ 48, 181–206 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-016-9565-3

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