Examining how parent and teacher enthusiasm influences motivation and achievement in STEM

Abstract

Parents and teachers play an important role in stimulating student motivation. The aim of this study was to examine if both parent and teacher enthusiasm could predict intrinsic motivation toward STEM activities, and if motivation would be associated with improved STEM achievement over one year in a one-year prospective examination of 288 Swedish students in their final year of a Science High School program (143 females and 145 males). Surveys of parent and teacher enthusiasm were collected at baseline, and student intrinsic motivation and GPA in STEM were assessed at baseline and at the end of the year. Baseline GPA and intrinsic motivation as well as follow-up intrinsic motivation were significantly associated with later GPA. Finally, intrinsic motivation mediated the relation between teacher and parent enthusiasm and change in GPA. Findings show the importance of parent and teacher enthusiasm for adolescent's intrinsic motivation and achievement in STEM.

I am Alexa, your virtual tutor!: The effects of Amazon Alexa’s text-to-speech voice enthusiasm in a multimedia learning environment

“…This can be especially apparent for business majors who generally hold lesser IT-related knowledge and experience, thereby compelling them to feel that such a topic is difficult, unfamiliar, and irrelevant to their business environment. Noteworthy, instructors’ enthusiasm can positively impact learners’ interest, motivation, and learning achievement in STEM subjects (Christensen et al, 2014 ; Jungert et al, 2020 ; Ramli & Talib, 2017 ). It is thus interesting to examine to what extent enthusiastic voices can affect the affective-motivational, cognitive, and learning outcomes of an IT topic among business majors in this study.…”

Resilience, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and anger: A linguistic inquiry into the psychological processes associated with resilience in secondary school STEM learning

“…More specifically, previous research suggests teacher support is an importance factor in persisting with STEM (Fredricks, Hofkens, Wang, Mortenson, & Scott, 2018; Simpkins, Liu, Hsieh, & Estrella, 2020; Trigueros et al., 2019). Increased teacher support is associated with a better self‐concept (Simpkins et al., 2020), attitude (Vennix, den Brok, & Taconis, 2018), and motivation (Jungert, Levine, & Koestner, 2020) to learn about STEM. In particular, teacher support has been shown to be important in determining STEM engagement from female students (Buday, Stake, & Peterson, 2012; Rice, Barth, Guadagno, Smith, & McCallum, 2013; Wang & Degol, 2013), and it is evident that the low resilient group in this study comprised more female than male students.…”

The effect of family support on student engagement: Towards the prevention of dropouts

“…Therefore, dialog groups of family and teachers could be developed to address students' learning problems, wherein the family could intervene as a mediator. Works such as those by Jungert et al (2020) have highlighted the critical role of parents and teachers in the achievement of student goals. It is also essential to help teachers motivate students and advance their behavioral engagement (Neugebauer, 2016).…”