Educators and policymakers have expressed considerable enthusiasm for engaging students with data. In this article, the authors consider how teachers commonly examine data with their students, and how these practices are likely to affect student motivation. Combining motivation research with their own study of teachers in six middle schools that…

This case study provides an explanatory account on the underachievement of three gifted students studying physics in a Taiwanese university. The students' physics underachievement was diagnosed by Sato's student-problem analysis chart. These students were invited to complete a questionnaire and a follow-up interview in order to (1) understand the…

This study examined the pre-service EFL teachers' self-efficacy beliefs, goal orientations, and participations in an online learning environment. Embedded mixed design was used in the study. In the quantitative part of the study, the participants were 186 senior pre-service EFL teachers and data were collected on two scales and a questionnaire.…

Recent studies indicate that the number of students electing to study Geography in Malaysian upper secondary schools, and their level of achievement in the subject, has declined. The main factor appears to be a lack of motivation. Yet there has been little research into the impact of instructional methods on Geography students' motivation and…

There has been considerable research interest into the relationship between the parenting styles of Asians, and student motivation and achievement. The investigation presented in this paper contributes to the literature in this area by examining the influence of perceived parenting style on goal orientations and career aspirations of a sample of…

Previous research showed that motivation influences writing in school settings (Hidi & Boscolo, 2006), but further empirical research is needed to understand how motivation influences specific writing tasks (Bruning & Horn, 2000; Haswell, 2006). This study addresses that gap in research by investigating how the motivational construct of…

This qualitative, grounded-theory study investigated learning motivation differences among three achievement groupings of undergraduate students enrolled in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Nine students participated in in-depth interviews that explored their reasons for pursuing their degree,…

This qualitative research study examined how exemplary 11th grade English teachers described their writing instruction. The seven teacher participants were selected for the study after receiving a "highly effective" evaluation and being identified by their principal, an assistant principal, and a department leader as being exemplary…

Academic writing at advanced levels is the most important way of demonstrating one's expertise in a discipline. Developing this kind of competence is especially a challenging effort for students in foreign language contexts. Many factors may be involved in determining why some students are more and some are less motivated in writing successful,…

This article presents one of the few recent attempts to investigate aspects of motivation of Greek gifted students. This effort is particularly challenging since gifted education in Greece is a nonexistent concept, and any study of Greek gifted students has to overcome obstacles related to definition, location and identification of gifted…

Team invasion games (TIG) make up a large part of the PE curriculum in Scottish schools. It is important, therefore, to understand the environmental conditions that contribute to pupils' motivation to learn to play TIG. Consequently, this study aimed to identify the teaching behaviours exhibited when teaching TIG using a game-based approach and a…

This qualitative study investigated the achievement goal orientations of a group of all male pre-med students attending a small, urban undergraduate college. Semi-structured interviews examined under what circumstances students adopted extrinsic goals, mastery goals, or a mixture of the two. Findings indicated that while nearly all students…

Student motivation during adolescence has become an increasingly important issue for educators and researchers. Using a goal theory perspective, researchers have investigated a range of goals (including achievement goals, social goals and future goals) that influence students' desire to achieve at school. The present study examines the range of…

In this interview, James Block explains the model of mastery learning, developed by himself and B. Bloom, according to which individual differences in academic ability are lessened by appropriate teaching methods. (GW)

In this second section of a two-part interview, Benjamin Bloom discusses practical aspects of implementing mastery learning in the classroom and presents some evidence on its motivational effects. For part one of this interview, see EJ 224 682. (SJL)