Non-traditional students represent an important group of university students, and that is why their motivation to study is an important factor that affects current university education. This study investigates the academic motivation of Czech students who are considered non-traditional because of their age (they are older than 26) and at the same time have experienced a break of at least one year in their formal educational trajectory. The Czech version of the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS) has been used to measure academic motivation. The purpose of this study is to examine the factor structure of the Czech version of the AMS on a sample of 1,885 first-year students at Masaryk University and determine if this tool is functional even on a specific group of non-traditional students and to identify differences in particular types of academic motivation between traditional and non-traditional students. The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that the Czech version of the AMS is a valid scale with a factor structure corresponding to the original model, and based on measurement invariance analysis we can state that the Czech version of the AMS can be used to compare traditional and non-traditional students. The results of regression analyses suggest that non-traditional students had significantly higher values for all types of intrinsic motivation and lower values for most types of extrinsic motivation. In the case of amotivation, it was again the non-traditional students with significantly lower values, which suggests that the absence of a motivation to study tends to be more common in younger students who are continuously receiving formal education.
The paper draws on the theory of learning by Knut Illeris to interpret data from qualitative research in intergenerational learning at Czech primary and lower secondary schools. It is focused on describing the forms of interaction through which intergenerational learning among teachers takes place, i.e., perception, transmission, experience, imitation, and participation. The results of the analysis are interpreted in the school context in order to show how interaction research may contribute to the analysis of intergenerational learning in a specificinstitution.
The objective of this paper is to show the way in which trust within a teaching staff translates into mutual learning among teachers. Using a qualitative investigation of two purposively selected schools representing a high and a low level of trust within the teaching staff, we illustrate that trust is a multi-layered phenomenon which in the context of learning among teachers is not necessarily productive to work with as a whole. We therefore separate trust within a teaching staff into the head teacher's trust in teachers, teachers' trust in the head teacher, overall trust among teachers, and finally trust between specific teachers in a learning relationship. We relate these levels of trust within a teaching staff and the three components of this trustcompetencies, relationships, and reliability-to the characteristics of mutual learning among the teachers at the selected schools. We conclude that our data shows that the key relationship influencing learning among teachers is that between the head teacher's trust and trust in the head teacher, which has the greatest impact on whether teachers accept the head teacher's concept of professional development and act accordingly. Overall trust among teachers has an influence on the level of independence of learning interactions and awareness of colleagues' learning but not on shared learning content.
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