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