Enhancing Our Understanding of Teachers' Personal Responsibility for Student Motivation: A Mixed Methods Study

Abstract

As measured by the Teachers Responsibility Scale, teachers appear to have surprisingly low levels of personal responsibility for student motivation even though they qualitatively identify low student motivation as a major teaching concern. Thus, the purpose of the current mixed methods research was to compare the way teachers' respond to items about personal responsibility for student motivation quantitatively and qualitatively. We used a convergent sequential mixed method design to answer the following research question: How do practicing teachers' perceptions and experiences of being personally responsible for student motivation converge with a quantitative measure of the construct? One hundred and 80 practicing teachers completed a self-report questionnaire on personal responsibility and then six teachers were purposefully sampled to participate in small-group interviews sharing their perspectives on responsibility for motivation specifically. The quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed separately and then integrated through a qualitative dominant crossover mixed analyses. Five mixed insights emerged and are represented in a joint display: dominance of interest, shared responsibility, divergent specificity and valence, complete alignment, and missingness of professional perspective. The mixed insights have important implications for theory, research, and practice and highlight the contribution that mixed methods can have in advancing motivation research.

Subjective Responsibility of Spanish University Teachers: A qualitative pilot study

“…Th e fi ndings of the mixed-methods research study of Daniels et al (2018) conducted with Canadian in-service teachers indicate a certain convergence and divergence. Results from the qualitative self-report questionnaires reveal that teachers feel responsible for student motivation; however, half the participants had a low score in the quantitative scale questionnaire survey.…”

“…Besides the term teacher subjective responsibility, authors also use the terms self-responsibility (Guskey, 1981), teacher's perceived personal responsibility (Matteuci & Kopp, 2013), or personal responsibility (Lauermann & Karabenick, 2011Daniels et al, 2017;Daniels, Poth, & Goegan, 2018;Eren & Çetin, 2018). Unlike the responsibility that is assigned, subjective responsibility is "a sense of internal obligation and commitment to produce or prevent designated outcomes or that these outcomes should have been produced or prevented" (Lauermann & Karabenick, 2011, p. 127).…”

Supporting pre‐service teachers’ motivation beliefs and approaches to instruction through an online intervention

“…Higher levels of personal responsibility in general are beneficial for teachers’ emotions, optimism, and hopefulness (Eren, 2014). Despite positive associations with outcomes, researchers consistently find that practicing and pre‐service teachers report substantially lower levels of responsibility for student motivation than the other three domains (Berger, Girardet, & Aprea, 2013; Daniels, Dueck, & Goegan, 2020; Daniels, Radil, & Wagner, 2016; Daniels, Poth, & Goegan, 2018; Eren, 2014, 2015, 2017; Eren & Çetin, 2019; Lauermann & Karabenick, 2013).…”

“…Exploring this disparity in detail, Daniels et al (2018) conducted a convergent sequential mixed method study examining teachers’ quantitative scores and their experiences of being responsible for student motivation. They found that some teachers viewed motivation as a quality that they can and should influence; whereas, other teachers viewed motivation as an innate quality that students ‘seem to have been born with’ (Daniels et al, 2018, p. 7). Similarly, Shalter Bruening (2010) found that some teachers believe that students will just be adequately motivated and, therefore, do not feel the need to address motivation.…”

“…According to Mindset Theory, people tend to approach a variety of personal qualities with either a fixed mindset, meaning the quality cannot be increased, or a growth mindset, meaning that the quality can be developed. Teachers’ descriptions of student motivation (Daniels et al, 2018; Shalter‐Bruening, 2010) imply that they may view motivation as a personal quality that ranges in terms of being fixed or growth. Taken together, a lack of personal responsibility and a fixed mindset for student motivation represent two obstacles pre‐service teachers face in supporting student motivation.…”