Middle School Students’ Expectancy-related Beliefs And Achievement Task Values In Mathematics

It has been a long history on motivation research and has led to abundant theories. Moti-vation is one of the crucial topics in Educational Psychology. As one of the most important motivation theories, Eccles’Expectancy-Value theory is that individual’s choice, persistence and performance are not only influenced by his or her actual ability but also can be explained by following two reasons:expectancy for success and subjective task values. There are lots of related researches overseas while a little in our country.This study adopts questionnaire survey and interview method to deeply investigate mid-dle school students’expectancy and value beliefs. There are three steps in this study. Step 1: Based on Eccles’expectancy-value concept, this study revised the questionnaire about Eccles’ structure of adolescent’s expectancy-related beliefs and subject task values. It proves that the scale has good validity and reliability. Step 2:Use the revised scale to investigate the expec-tancy-related beliefs and task values of middle school students. Step 3:make a qualitative analysis of interviews.Study 1 finds that there are six factors in the scale:expectancy, required effort, attain-ment value, intrinsic value, utility value and cost. The revised scale has good validity and reli-ability.Study 2 finds that middle school students have moderate expectancy-related beliefs and subjective task values. Expectancy is positively related to attainment value, intrinsic value and utility value but is negatively related to cost. There are significant difference between female and male in expectancy. There are significant difference between junior and senior middle school in expectancy and four kinds of task values. The score of junior middle school students is higher than senior middle school students on expectancy, intrinsic value and utility value factors. The score of senior middle school students is higher than junior middle school stu-dents on attainment value, cost and required effort factors. There’s an interactive effect be-tween gender and grade.Expectancy beliefs, attainment value, cost and utility value can pre-dict academic performance in math. Expectancy beliefs, intrinsic value, attainment value and utility value can predict learning strategy category in math. Among all the learning strategies, the most common strategy is effort regulation, while the least common strategy is peer learn-ing.Study 3 finds that:On expectancy:Most of the students are in middle level. On intrinsic value:Junior middle school students show more interests in math learning. On attainment value:Most of the students identify importance in math learning. On utility value:Junior mid-dle school students concern more about current life while senior middle school students con-cern more about future life. On cost:Senior middle school students show more cost in math learning. On required effort:Almost all the students say that they will try their best to learn math.