Learning motivation from a cross-cultural perspective: a moving target?     

Karin Täht  Olev Must  Kätlin Peets  Rainer Kattel 《Educational Research and Evaluation》2013,19(4):255-274

This paper investigates the relationship between educational achievement and the motivation to learn. We used the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that contains representative samples from 55 nations. A strong negative correlation between educational achievement and motivation toward science learning emerged at the national level. We found that differences in the socioeconomic levels of nations are associated with this unexpected negative correlation. Children from developed societies achieve higher educational results but may tend to be rather critical in describing their learning motivation, and vice versa, students from developing countries do not attain very high educational outcomes, but their motivation, as stated on the self-report questionnaires, is high. We offer different explanations for this phenomenon. The motivation to learn in relation to the level of development of countries is a moving target, and this should be taken into account at all levels of education policymaking, from schools to national governments.  相似文献   

Comparability of educational achievement and learning attitudes across nations     

Karin Täht  Olev Must 《Educational Research and Evaluation》2013,19(1):19-38

We estimated the invariance of educational achievement (EA) and learning attitudes (LA) measures across nations. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was used to estimate the invariance of educational achievement and learning attitudes across 55 nations (Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] 2006 data, N?=?354,203). The constructs had the same meaning (factor loadings) but different scales (intercepts). Our conclusion is that comparisons of the relationships between educational achievement and learning attitudes across countries need to take into consideration two sources of variability: individual differences of students and group differences of educational systems. The lack of scalar invariance in EA and LA measures means that the relationships between EA and LA may have a different meaning at the level of nations and at the student level within countries. In other words, as PISA measures are not invariant in scalar sense, the comparisons across countries with nationally aggregated scores are not justified.  相似文献