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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Lynn (1988) suggested that the Japanese entrance examination system provided junior
high school students with specific goals, proximate sub-goals and challenging goals
such as to promote motivation and achievement of almost all of the children, who
wanted to proceed to senior high school. Lynn also suggested that the entrance
examination system promoted students’ motivation because it provided students with
opportunities to co-operate to achieve the common objective within a group, and also
with competition between groups. Johnson et al. (1983) has indicated that a situation
containing both co-operation and competition facilitates the learners’ motivation and
achievement. However, there is a question as to whether learning mathematics for the
entrance examination affects pupils’ affective attitudes towards mathematics learning
negatively.

Eccles's (1983) expectancy-task value model defined learning for short-or long-term
goals, such as an entrance examination, as guided by extrinsic motivation and described
it as “utility value”. Utility value co-exists with three other task values: importance,
intrinsic value and cost. The task value which the pupils emphasised more in their
learning seemed to vary according to their age, but the task values did not exclude each
other. Therefore, some pupils may find that learning mathematics and developing their
mathematical ideas is enjoyable, while at the same time they try hard to learn
mathematics for the entrance examination.

Some researchers have suggested that pupils’ motivation to attain short-or long-term
goals is different from extrinsic motivation, and produces better outcomes than extrinsic
motivation. Harter (1992) found that intrinsic, extrinsic and internalised motivation were
three independent constructs of motivational orientation among 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th graders.
She suggested that internalised motivational behaviour was initially promoted by
external rewards offered by socialising agents, but then occurred spontaneously through
self-reward. Children with internalised motivational orientations were conceived as
engaging in learning for short-or long-term goals. She found that students with high
intrinsic and internalised motivation and low extrinsic motivation showed higher
perceived competence, positive affect towards learning and higher teacher acceptance
than students who were high in all three motivational orientations and students only
whose extrinsic motivation was high. Students who were low in all three motivational
orientations showed the lowest scores in all of the three domains. This research

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