PHD, Kent State University, 2018, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

According to the TIMSS 2015 international study findings, students who enjoy learning mathematics a lot scored much higher (average 61 points) than the students who do not enjoy it a lot. Enjoying learning mathematics is one of the indicators of the construct “intrinsic motivation” towards mathematics, and this type of other constructs, such as confidence, attainment value, and utility value were found to have significant contributions in students' academic achievement in previous studies. This study considered the Expectancy-Value Theory (E-VT) of achievement motivation and the Social Equity Theory (SET) to investigate racial-ethnic gaps in achievement motivational constructs as well as achievement scores of U.S. eighth-grade students in the mathematics and science domains. The TIMSS 2011 U.S. national data on mathematics and science were utilized to answer four research questions. The first research question addressed the psychometric properties of the achievement motivation scales in the TIMSS 2011 Student Background Questionnaire, and the findings of this study confirmed sound evidence regarding the construct, convergent, and divergent validity of the scales. The second research question looked for the racial-ethnic gaps in achievement motivational constructs. A series of measurement invariance tests confirmed that the racial-ethnic groups (Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White students) are not comparable after controlling for students' relative standing or ability levels on the constructs. The third and fourth research questions sought to determine the extent to which the E-VT and the SET explain variance in mathematics and science achievement. This study results showed that the E-VT constructs explain more within-group variance in the mathematics domain (with moderate to large effect sizes) than the science domain (with moderate effect sizes), and the SET variables explain the almost similar amount of within-group variance in both domains (with moderate effect (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jason Schenker Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Tricia Niesz Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lisa Borgerding Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Educational Evaluation; Educational Tests and Measurements