Teaching Practices and Student Motivation that Influence Student Achievement on Large-Scale Assessments

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the effect of teaching practices and student motivation on student achievement in mathematics. Two principal component analyses (PCA) were conducted. The first PCA was conducted to cluster 22 items related to teaching practices, in which the items were selected from a teacher questionnaire. The second PCA was conducted to cluster 11 items related to student motivation, in which the items were selected from a student questionnaire. Results from the first PCA revealed that the extraction of four components was found to be related to several frameworks found in the literature on teaching strategies. For the second PCA, two components were extracted which were related to student motivation. These extracted components were then used as two sets of independent variables in a hierarchical regression analysis in order to study their impact on student achievement in mathematics. The study revealed that four teaching practice components and the two student motivation components were significantly related to student academic achievement in mathematics on the large-scale assessment.