Den svårfångade motivationen. Elever i en digitaliserad lärmiljö

The elusive motivation: students in a digitalized learning environment

Student motivation and personal achievement goal orientations in a digitalized learning environment is the topic dealt with in this thesis. The investigated group of the thesis is the year nine students of three independent schools situated in three different municipalities, but all having the same governing board, from a private firm. The schools have long experience from using digital resources and all teachers and students are equipped with a personal laptop all day and night. The aim was to highlight the 15-16 years old students’ opinions and perspectives as well as their own reasons to perform or not in school, based on their outlook on what factors that encourage or restrain their motivation and achievement goal orientations towards the learning process in a digitalized learning environment. The theoretical framework is based on interactionist, cognitive and social-cognitive motivation theories, mainly found within the field of educational research and educational psychology. Achievement goal orientation theory constitutes the main focus of the theoretical framework. The thesis is a cross-sectional study and a comprehensive survey where mixed methods have been used. The collection of data has been conducted through semi-structured group interviews and questionnaires. Part of the questionnaire was taken, and translated from, the internationally renowned inquiry instrument PALS (“The Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales”) with the aim to test its validity and reliability in a Swedish educational context. The second part of the questionnaire, focusing on digital resources, was constructed based on questions from national and international studies. Content analysis, descriptive statistics, explorative and confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were the methods used to interpret, analyse and present the results. In conclusion, this thesis shows that student motivation is encouraged by varied teaching methods, a clear task structure, the practice of formative assessment and a social environment characterized by cooperation and good relations with peers and teachers. Moreover, student motivation is restrained by a low variety of teaching strategies, teachers’ lack of competence and deficiency in agreements regarding the distribution of assignments and the use of digital resources. Additionally, the digitalization of the learning environment contributes to a larger extent of student independence and simplifies the conduction of school work in general. According to the results, the students express a multiple set of personal achievement goal orientations consisting of mastery goal orientation and performance-approach goal orientation, including strong confidence in their own capacity to manage their studies with good results. The classroom goal structures depicted by the students are a combination of mastery goal orientation and performance-approach goal orientation, combined with teacher demands and expectations on their understanding when working on school tasks. Finally, the quantitative analysis shows that not all PALS-instruments are compatible with these students’ perceptions in this case. The problems concern mostly the proposed avoidance-orientation.The structure modeling supports the emphasis presented in the qualitative analysis stressing the importance of students’ mastery goal orientation and the classroom mastery goal structure of the teaching strategies. The aim of this thesis is to increase the knowledge about student motivation and achievement goal orientations in relation to the new prerequisites of classroom practise due to increased digitalization of the learning environment in schools.