Thesis advisor: C. Patrick Proctor / During adolescence, students engage in identity-formation processes that impact motivation to learn, as well as education and career choices moving forward. Adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) face particular challenges in developing a positive identity as a learner: feelings of decreased academic competence (Gans, Kenny, & Ghany, 2003; Terras, Thompson, & Minnis, 2009), increased school dropout rates (Deshler, 2005), and decreased feelings of global self-worth (Boetsch, Green, & Pennington, 1996) as compared to non-LD peers. Literacy is an area of particular concern. Given the importance placed on literacy skills in our society, it is unsurprising that difficulties in literacy learning impact the beliefs that students with LD develop about themselves (Burden, 2008). This study presents the results of an investigation into a group of students’ identity beliefs with regard to motivation, literacy and LD; how those beliefs were related to one another; and how those beliefs both shaped, and were shaped by, literacy experiences, using data collected during the 2014-2015 school year at one of the seven schools participating in the National Center on the Use of Emerging Technologies to Improve Literacy Achievement for Students with Disabilities in Middle School (CET; CAST, Inc, 2015; PIs: David Rose and Ted Hasselbring). Data gathered for the 11 participants included a literacy motivation battery; classroom observations; student interviews; and teacher interviews, informed by the Reading Engagement Index (REI; Wigfield et al., 2008). Both directed content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) were used to analyze the data. Developing a greater awareness of the role of motivation in the literacy practices of adolescents with LD will enable educators to better understand the conditions under which these students read and write most willingly. This knowledge can be incorporated into school-based curricula, interventions, and professional development, such that these students have reason both to value the learning challenges placed before them, and to expect to succeed at meeting those challenges.

French enrollment is not increasing at the rate of other modern languages in higher education in the United States. This study attempted to bring to light the reasons for studying the language and focused on the orientations, expectancies, and values students have for studying French at a large, public university. The mixed methods research investigated students' reasons for enrolling in an intermediate French course with a self-report survey including short answer questions. The aim of this principally quantitative study was to understand why students choose to study French by comparing the subscales within the orientations and expectancy-value scales. The foreign language orientation subscales used were: travel, knowledge, relationships, instrumentality, and the sociocultural orientation. For the expectancy-value scale, the subscales included: expectancy, intrinsic value, attainment value, and utility value. The mean values of the survey items were compared in an ANOVA framework. Relationships within the two scales were analyzed using a Pearson's correlation calculation. Finally, a linear regression was used to analyze the subscales as predictors of continuation of French study. Short answer responses supported the quantitative data through resulting themes and sub-themes. The data were merged in a validating quantitative data model of mixed methods. Results for foreign language choice pointed to travel reasons, such as the desire to spend time abroad, and intrinsic interest in the language. Students were likely to continue studying French due to sociocultural reasons, such as understanding French films and music, and due to instrumental reasons involving career and grades. The attainment or importance subscale of the expectancy-value scale was the best predictor of continuation. The short answer qualitative data were transformed to show the significant subscale orientations with corresponding sub-themes. The triangulation offered insight into FL choice and communication with people in francophone countries. The findings also suggested that students continue studying French due to particular career choices. Teaching implications and further study suggestions offer ideas for the significant subscales. The subscales that obtained low mean values in FL choice are also included in the implications section. This is due to the fact that the low scoring subscales are areas that have not been explored to encourage French study. Further study is needed to provide more details about students' experiences through interviews and to implement educational suggestions with enrollment tracking. The mixed methods design offers a base for similar FL motivation studies in the future. / Ph. D.

Value, a component of expectancy-value theory, has been shown to be predictive of task interest and choice. Attainment value, a component of value, has been defined as the degree to which a task affords the opportunity to confirm or disconfirm salient aspects of one’s self-conception. This paper presents a review of expectancy-value theory generally, and attainment value specifically. Additionally, given that attainment value has received relatively little research attention, the rationale, method, and results of a quantitative study of attainment value is presented. / text

The purpose of this research was to examine agricultural educators and adult agricultural education programming offered through secondary agricultural education programs within Illinois and Missouri using a non-experimental research design and a self-report questionnaire known as the Adult Agricultural Education Inventory (AAEI). AAEI was used to ascertain the level of expectancy and value held for adult agricultural education by secondary agricultural educators. The Expectancy-Value Theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) posits that if an individual holds high degrees of expectancy and value for a task, action or activity, that individual will continue to persist in that task, action or activity. There were 5 components of the AAEI, regarding adult agricultural education, including: 1) Utility Value and Attainment Value, 2) Expectancy and Intrinsic Value, 3) Time and Availability, 4) Community Demand and 5) Educator Knowledge. These 5 components were analyzed against a demographic profile of agricultural educators, constructed in this research, to delineate those groups of agricultural educators that indicate the higher levels of value and expectancy for adult programming. Value for adult programming was greater for those with Master's Degrees and those that taught in career and technical education centers. Expectancy for adult programming was greater for those educators who were from Illinois, educators holding a 10 month contract and males. Educators from Missouri indicated the highest amount of time and availability for adult programming.

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With student attrition in engineering most frequently occurring during the 2nd year due to perceptions of poor teaching and advising, curricular overload, and a lack of a sense of belonging, this study sought to address these concerns in a novel way through videos. This study was inspired by the success of existing on-campus mentoring services that enlist more advanced students to act as academic and cultural mentors, and sought to connect with students who may feel unwelcome or socially inhibited from attending similar services. On-campus support services have historically experienced service-level concerns with regards to overhead costs that have resulted in targeting specific audiences over restricted durations of time. Through these measures, both lack of awareness and social inhibition to attendance has resulted in some students not receiving the support that they need in order to succeed in engineering. To address this concern, this study developed and tested a video-based intervention on 2nd year students identified as 'at-risk-for-attrition' through GPA and self-reported measures of belonging in engineering. The intervention involved 18 junior- and senior-level engineering students participating in videotaped interviews that were segmented by topic into 305 videos and posted to a private Vimeo channel. These videos acted as static virtual mentors for the study participants. To evaluate the impact of these videos, an exploratory case study was conducted with 13 'at-risk-for-attrition' participants that included 7 women and 6 men. The participants completed a pre-intervention interview concerning their current status in engineering, a reflection of their first year, and perceptions of on-campus support services. Participants were then asked to watch one hour of videos, keep a notebook of their experience, and record the date and time that each video was watched. Once completed, participants participated in a post-intervention interview concerning their video choices, reactions, and outcomes of the experience, and any affordances that they saw in the intervention tool. Drawing on expectancy-value theory, the results of this study yielded a model for how participants made their video selections, how they reacted to virtual mentors and interpreted their video content, and how these reactions led to collective identity beliefs and intentions to act on the advice provided. Additionally, participants highlighted some of the affordances of offering mentoring through static videos. Of particular importance was the perception of shared identity between participants and mentors as a precursor to impacting future intentions to act on their advice. The findings led to recommendations regarding the redefinition of desired mentor traits for at-risk-for-attrition students was discovered, and also, the potential for offering virtual mentoring as a proxy or precursor to attending on-campus services without the program- and student-level concerns hindering current offerings. / Ph. D.

This dissertation focuses generally on consumer behavior, and particularly on consumer attitudes toward products of foreign origin for the purpose of developing a theory that will assist in explaining and predicting this phenomenon. Existing research in the area of country of origin effects upon consumer attitudes toward foreign-made products demonstrates significant methodological limitations such as single cue approaches., The major objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the development of a theory based upon the expectancy-value attitude concept to better explain and predict consumer attitudes toward products of foreign origin. To achieve this objective, the research attempts to overcome the limitations identified in attitude research and specific methodological deficiencies in research focusing on attitudes toward products of foreign origin by: 1. utilizing the expectancy-value approach; 2. basing operationalization of the attitude concepts on Likert-like scales and subjective conditional probabilities; 3. measuring the operationalized attitudes both directly and indirectly via beliefs and evaluations; 4. simultaneously including multiple extrinsic cues; 5. including pictorial cues in the questionnaire; and 6. performing and reporting validity and reliability tests. The general model developed in this research, representing the theory of attitudes toward products of foreign origin is the Foreign Product Attitude Model (FPAM). This dissertation will concentrate on an extracted part of the total model, namely the relationships between the informational stimuli cues and the attitudinal response. The informational extrinsic informational cues include the country of origin, the brand name, the store image and an involvement covariate. By concentrating on the above relationships it is hoped that this study will contribute to a better understanding of the direct effects of the informational stimuli upon the attitude toward a product of foreign origin. The country of origin effect and the other extrinsic cues (brand name and store image) were found to have significant effects on consumer attitudes toward products, explaining almost 20 percent of the total variance.

Matematik är ett av grundskolans kärnämnen, och matematiska kunskaper är avgörande för att människan ska klara vardagen i det moderna samhället. Elever är olika motiverade att lära sig matematik, och lärare har olika sätt att arbeta för att motivera dem. Studien syftar till att belysa hur lärare ser på motivation i matematikämnet och vad lärare gör för att motivera sina elever och därigenom få dem att fördjupa ämneskunskaperna. Förväntan-värde-teorin (expectancy-value theory) delar upp motivation i inre värde, nyttovärde, personligt värde och kostnad. Med den teorin som grund har jag med kvalitativ metod intervjuat lärare. Analysen av materialet visar att det är viktigt att läraren har förtroende för eleverna och en realistisk förväntan på vad eleverna redan kan i matematikämnet. Nyttovärdet betonas mest och kopplas ofta till läroplanens syfte med matematikämnet.

Denna studie syftar till att visa hur digitala verktyg används i gymnasiet inommatematikundervisningen, både utav lärare och elever i norra Sverige. Ytterligare undersöksäven elevernas åsikter om dess användning samt om de anser att det underlättar derasinlärningsprocess kring matematik eller inte. Detta har gjorts med hjälp utav en enkätstudie,SAMR-modellen och förväntan-värde teorin. Totalt deltog 102 elever i undersökningen.Resultaten visar att det inte finns några uppenbara för- eller nackdelar när elever använderdigitala hjälpmedel. Elever tycker dock att dess användning är bra inommatematikundervisningen, men främst när läraren använder sig utav det. Läraren använderfrämst digitala verktyg i sina genomgångar och för att visa hur det skall användas, elevernaanvänder det främst när läraren säger till dem att göra det, på prov och för att lösa svårauppgifter som de inte kan lösa med hjälp utav papper och penna ännu. / This study aims to show how digital tools are used in upper secondary school duringmathematics education, both by the teachers and the students in the northern parts of Sweden.Furthermore, student opinions of how these tools are used and whether the students think thisusage makes mathematics easier for them is also studied. This has been done through a surveythat makes use of a questionnaire together with the SAMR-model and the expectancy-valuetheorem. A total of 102 students took part in this study. The results show that there are noobvious benefits or disadvantages when the students themselves make use of digital aids.However, the students think that the use of digital tools are good in mathematics, but thebenefits mostly come from the teachers use of it. This study shows that the teachers mostlyuse these tools during their lectures or to show how it’s used. The students mostly use it whenthey’re told to by the teacher, during exams or to solve difficult assignments/problems thatthey haven’t learned to solve with pen and paper yet.