Moderators of Student-Teacher Agreement on Student Motivation

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Abstract

Consensus and shared meanings between students and teachers play a crucial role in academia. As learning in school may not always be as much fun for students as recreational activities, teachers are commonly faced with bored or frustrated students. To take students’ perspective and ultimately foster their motivation (Reeve & Cheon, 2021), teachers need to know how motivated their students are. This can help teachers to evaluate which students may need help to overcome low motivation. However, students and teachers were previously found to be barely agreeing about student motivation (Urhahne & Wijnia, 2021). Beside hard observability of motivation (as it is an internal state), students and teachers could have different concepts of motivation compared to motivational theories. For example, teachers view motivation rather as an entity that students have or have not instead of a process. Students also hold their own beliefs about their motivation which need not cover motivational theories. Consequently, if both students and teachers were queried about overall student motivation in school, they would likely find more consensus than if asked about specific motivational aspects (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015). In addition to the shared meaning, moderator variables of the target (i.e., students), the judge (i.e., teachers but also students), and the information that is used to form a judgment, can be explanatory of how well judgments align with the criterion (see Realistic Accuracy Model; Funder, 2012). For student characteristics, typically girls were shown to have closer relationships with teachers than boys. Therefore, it could be easier for teachers to infer information about girls’ motivation. Since students without a migration background are less stigmatized at school, teachers could be more in agreement with them than with students with a migration background. Older students are typically more accurate in self-assessing what could lead to higher agreement with their teachers compared to younger students. Regarding teacher characteristics, more experienced teachers, could also be better at assessing their students’ motivation because they have better strategies to retrieve relevant information about student motivation. Furthermore, since females are assumed to be more interpersonally oriented, female teachers may also be better at evaluating their students’ motivation. Teachers with a migration background tend to have closer relationships with their students, potentially resulting in greater insights into student motivation. Regarding the information that teachers have to judge their students’ motivation, the more time they see each other and the longer they know each other could be meaningful to agree more about student motivation. The present study therefore aims to examine possible moderators of student-teacher agreement according to the Realistic Accuracy Model. Furthermore, we were interested in teachers’ over- or underestimations of student motivation according to our hypothesized moderators. Methods A sample of 5,514 (Mage = 13.7, SDage = 3.47) secondary school student and their 212 teachers (Mage = 40.0 years, SDage = 10.6) both judged student motivation on a 7-P Likert scale (“How motivated are you/is the student currently at school?”) from “lowly motivated” to “highly motivated”. Gender (male/female) and migration background (yes/no) were assessed binary. The length of acquaintance was assessed in months teachers taught the particular class. The intensity of acquaintance was assessed in hours per week that teachers taught the class. To test the hypotheses, we employed linear mixed effects models due to the multilevel data structure. Teacher judgments of student motivation served as dependent variable. Student judgments of student motivation served as independent variable. We integrated the moderator variables stepwise in the order: (a) students’ characteristics, (b) teacher characteristics and (c) acquaintance characteristics. By predicting teacher judgments, we were able to retrieve the main effects of the moderator variables which explains teachers’ degree of over- or underestimating student motivation according to these moderator variables. Results Students and teachers were shown to agree about student motivation to a small degree (β = .26, p < .001). Regarding moderators of student-teacher agreement, teachers with a migration background agreed more with students z = 0.15, p = .002). All of the other moderators (students’ gender, age, migration background, teachers’ gender, teaching experience, students’ and teachers’ acquaintance in terms of length, intensity or their interaction) did not explain differences in student-teacher agreement. Regarding the main effects of the moderators, teachers judged girls as being more motivated than boys (z = 0.25, p < .001) as well as students without migration background more motivated than with migration background z = 0.09, p = .001). The more experienced teachers were the higher they judged student motivation (β = 0.09, p = .007). Discussion The results demonstrated that students and teachers had different impressions of students’ general school-related motivation. Against our hypotheses, no student characteristic explained differences in student-teacher agreement on this general measure. Teachers were thus shown to be equally (dis)agreeing with boys and girls, for example. For teachers, most interestingly their migration background enabled them to agree more with their students about their motivation. Teachers with a migration background could have had a better intuition of their students’ motivation because they could have experienced discriminative behaviors and thus want to avoid these behaviors in their own teaching. Furthermore, the level of acquaintance did not affect how well students and teachers agreed about the overall level of students’ school-related motivation although there were previously indications that acquaintance plays an important role in interpersonal judgments (Funder, 2012). The present results therefore stress the need to rethink the malleability of student-teacher agreement.

Speakers from the University of Münster

Beck, Jan Ulrich

Professorship for Psychology of Learning in Education and Instruction (Prof. Dutke)