Norms for Participation in a Middle School Mathematics Classroom and Its Effect on Student Motivation

In this article we examine how students engage in learning mathematical concepts in the middle grades of an urban public school in the Southwestern United States. In the context of a 3-year National Science Foundation-funded longitudinal study of the development of students' rational number understanding, we encountered differing levels of engagement among urban youth. We found that these levels of engagement are a byproduct of classroom teachers' practices and their expectations for student work in a high poverty, primarily Latino neighborhood school. This article describes ways in which classroom culture, including instruction and teacher expectations, influence the nature and extent of students' experiences and engagement in the middle school mathematics learning environment.INTRODUCTIONThis article illustrates the ways in which teachers encourage student contributions to classroom mathematical practices and the subsequent impact these practices have on student engagement. We examine four cases in a single school, classrooms often containing the very same students, but exhibiting markedly different practices and patterns of engagement. This study grew out of a 3-year longitudinal study primarily focused on illuminating the ways in which middle school children learn and understand mathematical concepts. The social environment is a key element of this learning and understanding, and it is therefore crucial to appreciate the ways in which classroom teaching practices and social setting impact student engagement.MotivationPsychologically, whether or not a student opts to engage in a learning environment is a function of his or her motivation. Most research on student motivation falls into two categories: the study of student expectancies, i.e., beliefs about their abilities or about the nature of the task (Eccles, 1983), and the study of values, i.e., how a student perceives the importance, usefulness or interest of a task (Wigfield & Eccles, 1992). Motivations can be drought of as cognitive structures that an individual constructs in order to anticipate the requirements for participation in some activity (Middleton, 1992,1993), and as such they play a key role in helping students decide when to engage, when to disengage, and how much effort to expend in academic tasks (Middleton & Toluk, 1999; Schoenfeld, 2007). They are a key variable for self-regulation, including the setting of goals, and the modulation of effort and the selection of tasks and long-term academic pursuits (Pintrich & Schunk, 2002). At a gross level, motivations can be categorized as intrinsic or extrinsic-involving learning "for its own sake," or learning to gain some incentive, but it is clear from both research and experience that for any situation, a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors determine the orientation of the learner to the task (see McClintic-Gilbert, Corpus, Wormington, & Haimovitz, this issue). According to Middleton and Spanias (1999; see also Middleton & Toluk, 1999; Middleton & Jansen, 2011), intrinsic motivation is significantly more desirable for student decision making than extrinsic motivation, as it engenders persistence, efficient cognitive processing, and positive affect, while extrinsic motivation affords little if any direct control of these factors. In the middle school mathematics classroom, intrinsic motivation influences decisions about whether to participate actively, to endure passively or to opt out. It is also important to note that students' decisions about whether or not to engage may or may not have to do with learning mathematics. They may be associated with personal interest in a problem's context, need for recognition and approval from the teacher and peers, or for purposes of social interaction.The aforementioned researchers have viewed motivational outcomes as the product of the individual. This is the prevailing notion of motivation in the current literature. …