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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The research discussed in this section indicates that pupils’ perceptions of classroom
ethos can affect students’ affective attitudes in learning. Age and cultural difference
seem to affect pupils’ perceptions of classroom ethos. Japanese children seem to prefer
co-operation to competition. They seem to prefer competition between groups rather
than competition between individuals. This seems especially the case for elementary
school children, who are likely to experience both co-operation and competition in a
group. Features of co-operation and competition seem to become more personal and
individual at junior high school.

Pupils’ motivational orientation and attitudes towards learning

Harter et al. (1984) showed that understanding the reasons for learning outcomes was
important for pupils’ academic performance and attitudes towards learning. Children who
understood the reasons for their learning outcomes were likely to ascribe them to
internal causes and achieve highly, and have higher perceived competence, positive
affect towards learning, intrinsic motivational behaviour and intrinsic judgement
regarding their learning than children who did not know the reasons for their learning
outcomes. Understanding the reasons for their performance is particularly important for
junior high school students, who come to have a more integrated network of constructs
across cognition, affect, motivation, and behavioural orientation.

Weiner et al. (1979) suggested that achievement-related affect was divided into two;
affect arising from the outcomes such as pleasure and disappointment, and affect
depending on individuals’ attributional styles. They found that individuals tended to have
a habitual way of explaining events that was a personal cognitive characteristic. These
stable individual differences mean that individuals tend to have a stable attribution style
across situations. Weiner et al. (1971, 1979, 1986, and 1992) analysed attribution in
terms of logical and empirical analysis, and proposed an 8-dimension classification
consisting of internal-external, stable-unstable and controllable-uncontrollable
dimensions. Current attribution research defines attributions based on ability, effort, task
difficulty and luck, but also more diverse attributions such as intrinsic motivation and
teacher’s competence (Pintrich, 1996; Weiner, 1986).

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