This survey is a case study with the purpose to find out the teacher´s perceptions about students´ motivation to mathematics. Further this study aims for the teacher´s vision on how they consider students´ motivation in mathematics in secondary school. To collect research data I have used semi structured interviews with four secondary school teachers. The result constructs according to categories that depict the purpose of the study. These categories define students’ motivation like achieving different goals, students’ basic knowledge, abilities and perceptions of mathematics and external factors that affect students’ motivation. Further the result was constructed according to categories that depict the teachers’ consideration to students’ motivation in mathematical teaching. These categories are the teacher´s attitudes, way of teaching and invidualizing work assignments.

Prior research has shown that negative attitudes toward mathematics are linked to decreased achievement and participation, but it is unclear what factors influence children’s attitudes toward mathematics. Thus, the overarching goal of this study was to understand the relationship between outside sources and children’s views. Specifically, this study investigated elementary students’ experiences with and views of mathematics and mathematicians, and the ways that their views may be influenced by popular media representations, parents’ views, and teachers’ views of mathematics and mathematicians. Additionally, the study examined whether there were differences between girls’ and boys’ views and between younger (Grade 4) and older (Grade 8) elementary students’ views of mathematics and mathematicians. Framed by a social constructivist and feminist epistemological stance, the study employed a multi-method framework comprised of questionnaires (n = 156), drawings of mathematicians (n = 94), and focus group interviews (five interviews, involving 21 participants) with students; an analysis of children's media (43 examples across five media types); interviews with parents (11 interviews, involving 13 participants); and interviews with teachers (nine interviews, involving 10 participants). In terms of their relationships with mathematics, the student, parent, and teacher participants’ views were encouraging, both in terms of perceptions of themselves as learners of mathematics and of the utility of mathematics. However, the manner in which the participants conceptualized mathematics tended to lack breadth, often focusing on arithmetic and financial mathematics. Similar conceptions of mathematics were evident in the media representations. Moreover, media portrayals of mathematicians and mathematically proficient people tended to perpetuate stereotypes. Despite their awareness of these stereotypes, the participants often lacked alternative representations to challenge these views. Indeed, the lack of exposure to a variety of representations of both mathematics and mathematicians contributed to the participants’ reliance on views that were often narrow and stereotypical.

Prior research has shown that negative attitudes toward mathematics are linked to decreased achievement and participation, but it is unclear what factors influence children’s attitudes toward mathematics. Thus, the overarching goal of this study was to understand the relationship between outside sources and children’s views. Specifically, this study investigated elementary students’ experiences with and views of mathematics and mathematicians, and the ways that their views may be influenced by popular media representations, parents’ views, and teachers’ views of mathematics and mathematicians. Additionally, the study examined whether there were differences between girls’ and boys’ views and between younger (Grade 4) and older (Grade 8) elementary students’ views of mathematics and mathematicians. Framed by a social constructivist and feminist epistemological stance, the study employed a multi-method framework comprised of questionnaires (n = 156), drawings of mathematicians (n = 94), and focus group interviews (five interviews, involving 21 participants) with students; an analysis of children's media (43 examples across five media types); interviews with parents (11 interviews, involving 13 participants); and interviews with teachers (nine interviews, involving 10 participants). In terms of their relationships with mathematics, the student, parent, and teacher participants’ views were encouraging, both in terms of perceptions of themselves as learners of mathematics and of the utility of mathematics. However, the manner in which the participants conceptualized mathematics tended to lack breadth, often focusing on arithmetic and financial mathematics. Similar conceptions of mathematics were evident in the media representations. Moreover, media portrayals of mathematicians and mathematically proficient people tended to perpetuate stereotypes. Despite their awareness of these stereotypes, the participants often lacked alternative representations to challenge these views. Indeed, the lack of exposure to a variety of representations of both mathematics and mathematicians contributed to the participants’ reliance on views that were often narrow and stereotypical.

This study investigated the role of demographic factors, English proficiency level, personal and affective factors in predicting language preparatory school students&rsquo / academic success. Participants of the study were 415 Department of Basic English students (158 pre-intermediate level, 158 intermediate level and 99 upper-intermediate level students) from a state university in Turkey. As data collection instrument, demographic information form, College Learning Effectiveness Inventory and Affective Characteristics Questionnaire were used. Multiple regression analysis was utilized to find the significant predictors. The results indicated that 53 % of the total variance was explained with the model. Among the predictor variables, English proficiency level, classroom communication, stress and time press and English self concept were found to be significant predictors of language achievement. The findings showed that students who had high proficiency level, better communication skills within the class, high English self concept and felt more stressful through the studies achieved higher scores in English Proficiency Exam.

The purpose of this study was to identify seventh grade students&rsquo / computational estimation strategies and factors associated with these strategies. A case study was conducted with five students. They were selected among 116 seventh grade students from a public elementary school in Aegean region. Two sessions of clinical interviews were carried out with each participant. In the first interview session, the Computational Estimation Test, which was consisted of 15 estimation questions, was administered to students with requesting explanations of solving procedure. In the second interview session, students answered to semi-structured questionnaire prepared by the researcher to understand their feelings and thoughts on estimation. The results of the study indicated that students used three kinds of computational estimation strategies, which were reformulation, translation, and compensation. Reformulation was the most used types of estimation and by all interviewees. It was divided into four sub-strategies, which were observed during the interviews, among them rule based rounding was the most preferred one. The most sophisticated strategy was compensation, which was used least frequently by the participants. The other kind of computational estimation strategy was translation, which means changing the operation for handling the questions more easily. Translation strategy was used students who performed well in number sense. Based on interviews and observations, there were some cognitive and affective factors, which were associated with the specified strategies. Number sense and mental computation were two sub categories of the cognitive factors. Besides these cognitive factors, confidence in ability to do mathematics, perception of mathematics, confidence in ability to do estimation, perception of estimation and tolerance for error, which were identified as affective factors, played important role for strategy selection and computational estimation. Good number sense may lead to use of multiple representations of numbers and use of translation strategies. Moreover, mental computation ability may enable students both to conduct reformulation and use compensation strategy easily. Interviewees who had both high confidence in ability to do mathematics and low confidence in ability to do estimation, preferred exact computation and more rule dependent estimation strategies, like rule based rounding. Low tolerance for error may influence students&rsquo / answers, in order to produce them in a narrow interval. Additionally, perception of estimation may lead students recognize estimation as useful and use of variety of computational estimation strategies. According to data analysis, feelings and thoughts about computational estimation may influence interviewees&rsquo / strategy usage, such as students, who had negative feelings on estimation and thoughts about mathematics wanted exactness, generally preferred exact computation process and did not use diverse computational estimation strategies. Students who had poor in number sense and mental computation could not conduct computational estimation strategies. Therefore, the research study may lead to better understanding of students&rsquo / perspectives on computational estimation. With understanding used strategies, and related factors are affecting computational estimation strategies, it might be produce effective instructional designs for teaching computational estimation.

This thesis examines motivation in English L1 learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) by analyzing the students' responses to a questionnaire modeled after Dörnyei's research and an observational instrument called the Motivation Behaviors of Language Learning (MBLL) modeled after Guilloteaux and Dörnyei's (2008) research on motivational teaching strategies on behaviors. The data from the questionnaires were subjected to a discriminative analysis of students answers in relation to a high grade (receiving a B- or higher) or lower (C+ or lower) in their Japanese classes. A Factor Analysis of the data was also carried out. The discriminative results could predict students' receiving higher or lower grades with 13-16% error. In addition, behaviors examined in the 200-level Japanese classes seemed to match students' responses to a questionnaire, suggesting they are not highly motivated. However, students who passed this class reported similar study habits outside of class in preparation as students from a 400-level class. The Factor Analysis also found that students with higher self-perception of their motivation and language aptitude tended to receive higher grades in the class. The results suggest that motivation can be further understood by understanding behaviors in addition to traditional questionnaires, and students' self perceptions of their language abilities may affect their grades in the language classroom. In the future, motivation research should include triangulating questionnaire data with other data, such as observational instruments. This thesis is a step in that direction.

Students learn many different concepts throughout their mathematical careers. In order to be successful in mathematics, students should be able to transfer these mathematical concepts learned in one situation and apply them to a new situation. There are many factors that might affect how students transfer knowledge; however research has focused mostly upon cognitive factors, even though affective factors might also exhibit a strong influence. This study examined how students' mathematical beliefs, specifically beliefs about mathematics education and self-efficacy, affect the transfer process. Data were collected from three middle school students. These data were collected through in-class observations, students' written work, and student interviews. The analysis of this data has shown that students' beliefs about mathematics education can affect specific steps in the transfer process as well as the transfer process in general. The data also showed that self-efficacy can influence the transfer process, but that this influence is mediated by the students' other mathematical beliefs.

Recent research in second language acquisition has focused on the effects of group work on learning by examining various factors (i.e., motivation, age, task, gender differences, etc.). One particular factor that has not been heavily investigated is interlocutor familiarity, which is at the forefront of the present study. Two separate classes (in both classes, n = 23) of introductory Spanish (Spanish 1002) at Temple University were used in the present study. Subjects in Class #1 worked with the same partner of their choosing throughout the semester. Subjects in Class #2 did not repeat partners and were assigned a different partner during each group task throughout the semester. All subjects received the same treatment. Part of this treatment consisted of two separate lessons on slang terms from Spain that included creative group work assignments. Learners' written group work assignments were collected for analyses. To examine and compare learners' retention in each of the classes, a total of three slang retention tests were administered. All three tests were individual assignments. The first slang test (Slang 1 Immediate Test) was administered on the second class session following Slang Lesson #1 and consisted of slang terms from Slang Lesson #1. The second slang test (Slang 2 Immediate Test) was administered on the second class session following Slang Lesson #2 and consisted of slang terms from Slang Lesson #2. At the end of the semester the third slang retention test (Final Slang Retention Test) was comprehensive, consisting of the slang terms from both lessons. Results suggested that learners' overall retention was higher in Class #1 than in Class #2. At the end of the semester, a Group Work Attitudes Questionnaire was administered and revealed that Class #1 viewed interlocutor familiarity and group work as positive, whereas Class #2 viewed group work as problematic. In addition, learners in Class #1 produced larger quantities of text in the group work assignments and engaged in more slang play than Class #2. The findings suggest the need to further investigate the effects of interlocutor familiarity on language acquisition. / Spanish

This study was an investigation of the validity of students' self-assessment of L2 oral performance, the influences of L2 affective variables on their self-assessment bias, and the degree to which the influences of L2 affective variables differ between high and low proficiency learners. The participants were 389 science majors from two private Japanese universities. A questionnaire was administered using items based on the Attitude/Motivational Test Battery (Gardner, 1985), the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwtiz et al., 1986), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), Sick and Nagasaka's (2000) Willingness to Communicate Scale, and items designed to measure motivation adapted from Gardner, Tremblay, and Masgoret (1997), Yashima (2002), Irie (2005), and Matsuoka (2006). A factor analysis identified seven factors in the questionnaire data: Self-Esteem, L2 Speaking Anxiety, L2 Willingness to Communicate, Attitude Toward Learning to Speak English, L2 Speaking Motivational Intensity, Desire to Learn to Speak English, and L2 Speaking Self-Confidence. The scales were further validated using the Rasch rating scale model. Student oral interviews were recorded and rated by five English teachers using an oral assessment scale based on the Kanda English Proficiency Test (Bonk & Ockey, 2003).Immediately after the interviews were completed, the participants were asked to consider how they perceived their own speaking performance and they rated their own performance from their memory using the same oral assessment scale that the teacher raters used. The oral assessment scale included the descriptions of the oral performances that match each level. The participants read the descriptions of each level and chose a level that they thought matched their own performance. The study produced four main findings. First, a multi-faceted Rasch analysis revealed that the participants rated their own L2 speaking more severely than the teacher raters and that the students' self-assessments were neither reliable nor consistent. Second, self-assessment bias measures were calculated and used to test a hypothesized structural model of how affective factors influenced self-assessment bias. The hypothesized model showed poor fit to the data, possibly due to the poor reliability of the self-assessment measures. Multiple regression analyses conducted as a follow-up analysis revealed that participants with greater Desire to Learn to Speak English tended to underestimate and those with greater L2 Speaking Self-Confidence tended to overestimate their own speaking performance. Third, 106 participants whose self-ratings were similar to the teachers' ratings were compared with other students in order to examine their distinctive features. However, no significant differences in L2 oral proficiency or affective variable measures were found between the two. Therefore, those whose self-assessments agreed with teachers could have resulted in some agreements that occurred by chance alone. Finally, 100 higher proficiency students were compared with 100 lower proficiency students and the results showed that the higher proficiency students with greater Desire to Learn to Speak English generally underestimated their L2 speaking proficiency, while those with higher Self-Esteem and greater L2 Speaking Self-Confidence tended to overestimate it. Lower proficiency students with greater L2 Speaking Self-Confidence tended to overestimate their L2 speaking proficiency. The results suggest that the self-assessment of L2 speaking might not be a sufficiently reliable or consistent assessment tool. Therefore, if teachers are considering including self-assessment in a speaking class, self-assessment training should be conducted. Additionally, giving L2 learners more opportunities to speak the L2 can help them notice gaps between their productions and those of proficient speakers, which might lead to more accurate self-assessment. Second, although some studies utilized only one teacher-rater, five teacher raters in this study displayed a great deal of diversity and exhibited unique bias patterns, so multiple raters should be employed and Facets analyses should be employed because the multi-faceted Rasch model provides person ability estimates that are adjusted for rater bias. Finally, the use of multi-faceted Rasch analysis is useful for examining oral data because unlike raw scores, multi-faceted Rasch analysis provides detailed information concerning speaker ability, rater severity, and category difficulty. Moreover, while most researchers have utilized self-assessment raw scores, in this study bias measures of self-assessment were calculated using Facets, which indicated that the bias measures produced different outcomes compared with self-assessment scores. / Teaching & Learning

This paper is a study in the linguistic field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), with some overlap in the relation of language and gender. Focus is placed on adults' experiences and feelings towards using their learned language in different scenarios and whether there are any substantial differences related to the sex of the learner. The main questions discussed are, firstly, how confident Swedish adults are when communicating in English in different scenarios with different recipients. Secondly, what factors there are and how these factors influence adults' feelings towards communicating in English. The paper compares a sample of female and male adults of varying ages from 23-70, who live in Sweden. Using quantitative and qualitative questions in a questionnaire paired with an interview, this paper examines the feelings towards communication in English among adults and how these feelings have changed since they were in school. The study research how language anxiety and motivation relates to learning and using a foreign language. The research also examines if these factors have any connection to the participant’s sex. Learning how the affective factors or individual differences change over time can aid future teachers of English in motivating and helping students struggling with learning English. At some point during their period of studies, most adults in the study reported that they felt language anxiety or lack of confidence. However, the findings of this study that most adults eventually outgrow such anxiety and develop confidence as they become older and use English more.