5th and 8th grade pupils’ and teachers’ perceptions of the relationships between teaching methods, classroom ethos, and positive affective attitudes towards learning mathematics in Japan

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needed to feel self-efficacious to have confidence in raising their hands in response to
difficult questions. In contrast, to raise their hands for easy questions, they needed
appropriate outcome expectancy such as their peers’ acceptance and an outcome-value
such as the value of responding. This study suggests that promoting pupils’ self-efficacy
by promoting their understanding of the curriculum and promoting pupils’ outcome
expectancy by arranging good relationships in a class to encourage pupils to be involved
in mathematics classes positively may both be effective.

Pupils’ perceptions of their competence and self-efficacy are subjective ∞ncepts
affected by the individual’s personality, personal history and environmental factors.
These perceptions are conceived as influencing their motivation and the improvement of
their performance more than their knowledge and skills. Teachers should attempt to
ensure that pupils believe that they can manage the task and that their learning activities
are worth doing, to set up optimal specific learning goals while valuing pupils’ autonomy
in learning, and to arrange the classroom ethos to support an individual child’s
performance outcomes. All these activities enhance pupils’ perception of their
competence and self-efficacy. These, in turn, enhance pupils’ motivation and lead to
better performance.

2.2: The relationships between pupils’ enjoyment, motivation, sense of security and
sense of progress

The relationships between pupils’ enjoyment and motivation

The Ministry of Education in Japan (1999) emphasises promoting pupils’ intrinsic
motivation, as reflected in their belief that showing pupils that mathematics learning and
developing mathematical ideas can be enjoyable, is important. The results of TIMSS
showed that 91% of Japanese 8^th graders believed that getting high marks in
mathematics tests is important in order to succeed in the entrance examination to senior
high schools and university (National Institute fpr Educational Research, 1997). Thus,
extrinsic motivation is very important for some school pupils. Some observers from other
countries have seen the Japanese system of entrance examination as a strong
motivator.

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