British Journal of Educational Psychology最新文献

Background: According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), motivation is inherently present in every individual, growing from amotivation via controlled to autonomous motivation, through fulfilment of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Peer relatedness has been found to influence motivation multimodally. Students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) in special education risk additional challenges in motivation and peer relations. How peer relations influence school motivation according to SEBD students' experiences remains unclear.

Aims: Investigating how peer relations influence SEBD students' motivation in special secondary education.

Sample: Forty-nine SEBD students (age 12-18) from 11 special secondary schools in the north of the Netherlands.

Methods: Transcripts of semi-structured interviews from an SDT perspective were thematically analysed for particular information on peer relations and motivation.

Results: Students positively graded their motivation. Peer relations and students' motivation seemed to influence each other: (1) friends and classmates were salient reasons for school attendance; (2) peer relations influenced schoolwork motivation through relatedness, distraction, cooperation, engaging each other and being alone/loneliness.

Conclusions: Consistent with previous findings, peer relations influence students' motivation in special secondary education. This influence seems reciprocal, additionally shaped by SEBD and a special education context. Feelings of (not) belonging in special education influenced school attendance and schoolwork motivation through different mechanisms, with which variations in motivational orientation, diagnosis and gender might interfere. Future research should investigate the influence of type of diagnosis, additional roles of competence and autonomy for SEBD students and possible generalizations of findings in other special and mainstream education settings.

Background: Extending recent work on mindset contexts, researchers have explored how peer mindsets relate to students' outcomes in the classroom. However, little is known about the specific behaviours that signal peer mindsets to students, and prior work has used correlational methods.

Aim: The present study aims to identify specific peer behaviours that indicate their mindset beliefs to others and their impact on students' psychological and academic experiences.

Methods: We conducted qualitative focus groups (N = 15) and an experiment (N = 605) with undergraduate students. We developed vignettes that experimentally manipulated mindset-signalling peer behaviours in a hypothetical peer. Participants then rated their perceptions of the hypothetical peer's mindset and their expected classroom experiences.

Results: We found that seven peer behaviours-self-deprecation, withdrawing effort, explicit verbal messages, competitiveness, disinterest in helping others, boasting about success, and downplaying struggles-shaped students' perceptions of peer mindset. These perceptions, in turn, influenced their anticipated sense of belonging, imposter feelings, evaluative concerns, and academic risk-taking. Female students were more likely to perceive competitive and unhelpful peers as having a fixed mindset.

Conclusion: The findings underscore the importance of peers in fostering inclusive, motivation-supportive classrooms. The seven identified behaviours serve as a foundation for future interventions designed to reshape peer interactions and foster a classroom environment that promotes a growth mindset.

Aim: Responses to complex problems demand collaboration across practice boundaries. The studies presented here make visible the processes that constitute successful collaborations between practitioners and clients.

The argument: Complex problems can be discovered, where practitioners recognize and address complexity through an existing repertoire of responses. Or they are created problems, where researchers reveal new phenomena and create new knowledge. That knowledge can then be used to inform responses to discovered problems.

The studies: The research on created problems discussed here asked: What happens at the intersection of practices during work on complex problems; how are motives aligned to expand and respond to the problem; and what kind of expertise is involved? The discovered problems were in: pedagogic work with parents in a daycare centre, the development of an app to support autistic people in the workplace and an evaluation framework examining interprofessional working.

The relational concepts: New knowledge, arising in studies of emergent interprofessional working in English children's services, explains how working relationally can strengthen responses. The three relational concepts are based in cultural-historical approaches to human development. They are: relational expertise, which builds common knowledge, comprising the motives of participants, which mediates collaborations, creating relational agency. Relational agency then strengthens the actions taken by practitioners and clients.

Implications: The relational concepts offer guidance for training practitioners in interprofessional working and in building the agency of clients. They offer researchers a framework for examining collaborations and show how cultural-historical research methods capture concepts in practitioners' actions.

Background: Achievement emotions are important for mathematical achievement. However, it is currently unclear how specific combinations of emotions-and their associated control and value appraisals-relate to mathematics performance, especially in younger students.

Aims: The aims of this study were to (i) identify heterogeneous profiles of control, value and achievement emotions (enjoyment, boredom and anxiety) experienced during primary-school mathematics lessons, and to explore how profile membership related to (ii) mathematics test scores and (iii) gender.

Sample: Our sample comprised 883 students (50% girls, M_age = 9.34 years, SD = .48) from 23 primary schools in England.

Methods: Data were collected longitudinally over one academic year. Students completed mathematics tests at T₁ and T₃, and self-reported their control, value and achievement emotions in mathematics lessons at T₂. A latent profile analysis was conducted to identify profiles of appraisals and emotions. To validate the profiles, T₃ mathematics test scores and gender were included as covariates of profile membership.

Results: Three profiles were identified: The Positive profile, Negative profile and Mixed profile. Students in the Positive profile had significantly higher mathematics test scores at T₃ than students in the Mixed profile. Being a girl increased the likelihood of belonging to the Mixed or Negative profile relative to the Positive profile.

Conclusions: Primary school students' control and value appraisals and achievement emotions co-occur in line with the theoretical assumptions of CVT. Combinations of emotions should be considered when exploring the impact of emotions on student learning and achievement in mathematics.

Background: Recent research has increasingly focused on the role of teachers' empathy in classrooms. However, due to the inconsistencies observed in its conceptualization and assessment, whether this competence is key for effective teaching remains unknown. Grounding empathy research on previous approaches to the understanding of emotions, such as the control-value theory, could be the key to assess teachers' empathy messages, understood as their demonstration of an understanding students' context, appraisals and emotions. Moreover, reaching an understanding on how teacher motivation might shape their instructional practices (i.e., messages) and these student outcomes is also crucial.

Aim: This study aimed to develop a framework of teachers' empathy messages, examined their use of across the academic year, and how contextual classroom characteristics, teachers' enthusiasm and students' grades related to their usage.

Sample: Participants included 45 teachers and 1370 students distributed in 66 classrooms across 24 high schools.

Methods: Teacher empathy messages were assessed through audio recording of teachers' speech during lessons. Messages were extracted from transcriptions with the help of large language models. Teacher enthusiasm was assessed on T1 and T3. Student's grades were collected from academic records at the end of the course (T3).

Results: Overall, the number of students per class increased the number of emotion empathy messages used by the teacher. Teachers' enthusiasm was associated with the number of messages used whereas no significant relation was observed between messages and students' grades.

Conclusions: This study presents a practical framework to assess teacher empathy messages. Findings also highlight how teacher motivation (i.e., enthusiasm) can shape their teaching practices.

Background: There are many ways to leverage support from friendships, and it is important for how students engage with learning in the classroom. Further, friendships are embedded within the larger classroom peer group, which might have different norms for prosocial or disruptive behaviour. Few studies have examined how friends support or deter engagement within the context of competing influences from classmates and popular peers.

Aims: This study investigated how early adolescents' classroom friendships were related to their engagement (behaviour, emotion and peer help-seeking). Moreover, whether these associations depended on classmates' and popular peers' behavioural norms.

Sample: Participants were 824 fifth and sixth graders (52% girls, 48% boys, 43% White, 30% Black, 6% Hispanic, 6% Asian and 16% multiracial or other) from 46 classrooms in the United States.

Methods: We used multilevel modelling to examine the associations between students' friendship experiences (best friend quality, reciprocated friendships, social network centrality and prestige), peer group norms (prosocial and disruptive) and students' engagement.

Results: Results showed that the quantity of reciprocated friendships was unrelated to all three types of engagement. However, engagement was positively associated with best friendship quality and with friendship centrality (i.e., being well-connected to many friends). Students' prestige, or being highly desired as a friend, did not diminish behavioural engagement when popularity norms favoured prosocial behaviour.

Conclusions: Findings suggest not all aspects of friendship experiences are equal. For engagement, it is important for students to feel like they have friends in class and to draw attention to the prosocial behaviour of popular peers.

Background and aims: Drawing on self-determination theory, we investigated: How does teacher motivation vary over time? How does motivation vary across activity contexts? What is the association between teachers' motivation and affect?

Sample: One hundred sixty teachers in two districts in the Northeastern United States.

Method: Using a day reconstruction method (DRM) instrument, we measured teachers' daily work activities, and their motivation and affect during activities. Because our data had a three-level structure (periods within days within teachers), we used multilevel models to explore variation in teachers' situational motivation across both time and activity type. For each subscale, we fit empty models that decomposed variance in outcomes between teachers, days and episodes. We then used conditional models to examine how these outcomes varied across teaching activities, controlling for years of experience and grade level. Finally, we explored the interplay between emotion and motivation.

Results: We found that teachers' motivation is dynamic within teachers and is associated with both the professional activities in which they are engaged and their concurrent affective state. Whereas we found that positive affect during a period was positively and strongly associated with intrinsic motivation and identified regulation during that period, higher levels of negative affect during a period were associated with lower levels of intrinsic motivation and higher levels of external regulation.

Conclusions: This study provides an understanding of K12 teacher motivation as a dynamic experience and demonstrates the potential of measuring teacher motivation as temporally dynamic and contextually bound.

Background: High working memory capacity is associated with improved mathematical problem-solving skills. A leading theory about why working memory enhances problem-solving suggests that capable problem solvers might offload information from their working memory for later use.

Aims: This study examined whether the ability to offload information improved problem-solving for learners with lower working memory capacity.

Sample(s): The participants consisted of 93 undergraduate students from a mid-sized university in the United States.

Methods: Participants first took a 10-problem pre-test, followed by working memory tasks. They were then split into two groups: one with the option to offload using paper and pencil and one without. As part of a post-test, they completed 10 math problems.

Results: Results indicated that both the offloading and no-offloading groups improved over time; however, the effect was greater for the offloading group, according to Hedges' g. Although no significant interaction between working memory and condition was found, offloading was useful for specific ranges of working memory skills, according to the Johnson-Neyman technique. An interaction analysis of pretest and condition also suggests that offloading may be beneficial with increased prior knowledge.

Conclusions: These findings emphasize the importance of considering students' prior knowledge in working memory research. They also demonstrate how external aids influence cognitive processes during problem-solving.

Background: As children mature, they tend to develop a fixed mindset in math, which has been identified as a contributor to declining confidence and widespread anxiety in math. Both parents and teachers can function as critical socializers in shaping children's fixed mindsets.

Aims: Given that children's beliefs are formed through interactions with socializers, we tested our hypothesis that the mindsets and expectations of parents and those of teachers perceived by students would predict the children's mindsets, motivation and achievement in math. We further posited that these social influences would indirectly shape students' self-efficacy and test anxiety through students' mindsets, ultimately predicting their persistence and achievement in math.

Sample and methods: Using multilevel path analyses, we analysed the data from 507 third- and fourth-graders in 28 classrooms and their parents in Korea.

Results: Among the self-reported parental measures, only parental expectations for their child's success in math were a significant negative predictor of students' fixed mindsets in math at the within-class level. Student perceptions of their teacher's fixed mindsets and expectations were, respectively, a positive and a negative predictor of students' fixed mindsets. Students' fixed mindsets, in turn, positively predicted their math test anxiety and negatively predicted their math self-efficacy, persistence, and achievement. Patterns observed at the between-class level were generally consistent with those at the within-class level.

Conclusions: This study found meaningful associations of self-reported parental beliefs and student-perceived teacher beliefs with student mindsets, motivation, and achievement in math. Longitudinal or experimental research is needed to clarify their causal relationships.

Background: Teachers' goals play an important role in teaching quality and student outcomes. However, the processes through which this aspect of teacher motivation translates into specific teaching behaviours remain unclear.

Aims: This study investigates how goals directed at students and the classroom are associated with visual information processing of classroom events, aiming to link teacher motivation with professional vision.

Sample: The study involved 51 preservice teachers with an average of 36 days of practical teaching experience.

Methods: Participants' eye movements were recorded through eye tracking while they observed a video stimulus of an 11th-grade mathematics classroom. Through an interview, participants specified their goals for individual students and the whole classroom after having watched the start of the video stimulus. During the rest of the 3-min-long simulation, eye-tracking recorded the number and duration of fixations on students.

Results: Goals directed at individual students were associated with more and longer fixations. In contrast, goals targeting the entire classroom were associated with shorter fixation durations on individual students, indicating a more even distribution of visual attention. Especially mastery goals drove these patterns; nuanced effects were observed depending on goal content and the visual saliency of student behaviours.

Conclusions: Preservice teachers' student-oriented goals shape their visual attention in the classroom, influencing how they perceive the interaction with students. This research highlights the importance of integrating teacher motivation with professional vision to understand the cognitive pathways that link motivation to teaching behaviours. The study also demonstrates the utility of eye tracking technology in exploring these processes.