Eric.ed.gov – Affective and Motivational Characteristics of 60 Urban JHS Math Classrooms: A Class-Level Analysis of Student Beliefs in Three Instructional Activity Settings.

This study is an exploratory analysis of class-level data concerning junior high school (JHS) students’ affective and motivational beliefs. It examines class-level information on selected psychological characteristics that students, who read at the fifth-grade level, bring to learning mathematics and that teachers encounter during instruction. Focus is on the variability among 60 classes on 7 affective and motivational indicators and determining whether teachers encounter different psychological characteristics of a class across classes of different mathematical achievement levels and in the same class across different activity settings. Study data are from the fall 1988 administration of the Mathematics Assessment Questionnaire (MAQ) to 1,737 students in 7th- through 9th-grade mathematics classes at 8 junior and senior public high schools in New York City. Students’ responses to four affective beliefs (value, interest, confidence, and anxiety), two motivations (internal learning goals and external performance goals), and one attribution (unknown control) are examined. Differences among classes and among activity settings are found. This study highlights to the wide differences among mathematics classrooms in the psychological environment for learners and teachers, and provides an exploratory analysis of differences that may characterize urban mathematics classrooms on several important belief areas related to mathematics learning. Included are 1 table, 12 bar graphs, and an illustration of study calculations. (RLC)