Culturalizing Motivational Theory: An investigation on expectancy-value theory across 52 countries

Abstract

Objectives: Although culture had been conceived to influence student learning, its role on students’ academic motivation has been under-researched. According to expectancy-value theory (EVT; Wigfield, Tonk, & Eccles, 2004), cultural milieu is proposed to affect student motivational process, which in turn influences student academic performance. However, the proposition has been rarely tested. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the effect of national culture on student mathematics motivation (MM) and how MM mediated the effect of culture on student mathematics achievement (MA). Theoretical framework: Drawing on EVT, three motivational constructs including mathematics intrinsic value (MIV), mathematics utility value (MUV), and mathematics self-concept (MSC) were considered. Besides, three cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov (2010), i.e., individualism (IDV), uncertainty avoidance (UAI), and long-term orientation (LTO), were employed to conceptualize culture as they have been found to affect student learning process. Methods: We analyzed PISA 2012 data from 418,498 15-year-old student across 52 countries in combination with the national cultural indices from Hofstede et al. (2010). Three culture dimensions (IDV, UAI, and LTO), three motivational constructs (MIV, MUV, and MSC), and MA were utilized, while controlling for national GDP per capita PPP, family socio-economic status (SES) and student gender. Multilevel path analysis was employed to treat student, school, and country as the first-, second-, and third-level respectively. Due to the limited number of level-3 sample (N = 52), three path models were built to examine the mediation effects of MIV, MUV, and MSC separately to avoid model nonidentification. Results: The results revealed negative associations between UAI and LTO and all the three motivational constructs, which indicated that students in countries with higher uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation possessed lower MIV, MUV, and MSC. IDV was significantly associated with students’ MIV but not with MUV and MSC: students from higher individualist countries reported lower MIV. Regarding the indirect effect, national culture generally had positive indirect influences on student MA via student motivation, although with some exceptions, indicating that students in countries with high levels of IDV, UAI, and LTO tend to have low MM, which in turn lead to high national average MA. However, we found that these positive indirect effects were largely cancelled out by the negative direct effects of national culture on MA, except for LTO. Significance: To conclude, national culture differentiates motivation (MIV, MUV, and MSC), which plays a critical mediating role in shaping the relationship between culture and MA at country level. The findings confirmed the effect of culture on students’ motivational process from the perspective of EVT. This suggests that endeavors to improve student motivation should not ignore the importance of culture and cultural-specific approach might be needed to motivate student mathematics learning.