Students’ Interests, Motivation, and Self-beliefs

Effective teaching of mathematics and science includes understanding the importance of positive attitudes toward learning, and fostering their development among students. Many studies have shown that students’ motivation to learn is related to higher achievement, but when making decisions to improve learning and practice, it is important to recognize that cultural influences may also play a role, and establishing links between achievement and motivation are thus especially complex. As well as measuring student achievement, IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) thus collects data about these contexts for learning through questionnaires completed by students and their parents, teachers, and school principals. Data gathered by TIMSS 2019 at grade four indicate that relationships between motivation and achievement show many similarities across the Dinaric region, and reveal characteristics of the underlying structure of relations between attitudes, achievement, and learning support to students in the region. As expected, students with more home learning resources tended to show higher mathematics and science achievement. Students’ confidence in their mathematics or science abilities tended to be positively correlated with their achievement. Associations between mathematics or science achievement and liking learning mathematics and science were weaker than the links with reported confidence, but students who reported feeling more confident in mathematics or science and those who reported stronger feelings of belonging to their school were also more likely to report that they liked mathematics and science. There was no strong association between students’ home learning resources and liking learning subjects; thus indicates that school environment plays an important role in supporting motivation for learning. Although similar relations were found across the region, student attitudes in education systems where achievement was high tended to be more negative; this is known as the attitudes-achievement paradox. The results suggest that further studies of national attitudes are needed to better understand local relations between student motivations and achievement.