The nature and development of student motivation.

AIM: The aim of the present series of studies was to investigate what motivates undergraduate students and how their motivation changes during their degree course. The present research investigated both subject specific and generic motivators by asking students what knowledge areas, skills and experiences were important to them. SAMPLE: Study 1: 336 prospective and current undergraduate psychology students at a university in southern England. Study 2: 57 year one psychology students from a university in the north of England. Study 3: 30 undergraduate psychology students from the university used in Study 1. METHOD: The studies used a modified version of the Radford and Holdstock (1993) scale to assess students' objectives in taking a degree programme, by rating the importance of knowledge areas, skills development and experiences. Study 1 used a cross-sectional design comparing responses of student by year of study. Study 2 compared responses of students in year one in Study 1 to students at a second university. Study 3 used a longitudinal design to investigate changes in values by year of study. RESULTS: The findings suggest that there are two types of students: those who are motivated by the discipline itself and those who are motivated by the acquisition of more general skills and experiences. The perceived importance of many aspects declines over the three years of the degree, and seems especially low in year two. However, some aspects, notably research methodology, and some skills and experiences show marked increases in the final year. CONCLUSIONS: Current theories of educational motivation need to be extended to account for the difference between subject-related and generic motives.

Falsifying mental models: testing the predictions of theories of syllogistic reasoning.

Four experiments are reported that tested the claim, drawn from mental models theory, that reasoners attempt to construct alternative representations of problems that might falsify preliminary conclusions they have drawn. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to indicate which alternative conclusion(s) they had considered in a syllogistic reasoning task. In Experiments 2-4, participants were asked to draw diagrams consistent with the premises, on the assumption that these diagrams would provide insights into the mental representation being used. In none of the experiments was there any evidence that people constructed more models for multiple-model than for single-model syllogisms, nor was there any correlation between number of models constructed and overall accuracy. The results are interpreted as showing that falsification of the kind proposed by mental models theory may not routinely occur in reasoning.

A new approach to exploring biases in educational assessment.

This paper presents and illustrates an approach to the study of marking biases based on multi-sample confirmatory factor analysis. This is applied to the marks awarded by two independent markers to the final year dissertations of 197 female and 58 male psychology undergraduates. One of the two markers had supervised the work on which the dissertation was based on a one-to-one basis. The results suggest that about 30 per cent of the variance in the supervisor's mark is attributable to influences which are specific to the supervisor, orthogonal to the merit of the project as assessed by the two markers jointly, and general across each of the four marks awarded by the supervisor. The most plausible interpretation of these influences is that they represent a contamination of the supervisor's mark by personal knowledge of the student. These biases in the supervisor's marking were found to have more influence for male than for female students and to elevate the marks of males relative to those of females to a small but significant extent. It would be unwise to overgeneralize from these findings, but they demonstrate the potential value of this method of studying marking biases.

On the mental representation of conditional sentences.

Four experiments are reported which attempt to externalize subjects' mental representation of conditional sentences, using novel research methods. In Experiment 1, subjects were shown arrays of coloured shapes and asked to rate the degree to which they appeared to be true of conditional statements such as "If the figure is green then it is a triangle". The arrays contained different distributions of the four logically possible cases in which the antecedent or consequent is true or false: TT, TF, FT, and FF. For example, a blue triangle would be FT for the conditional quoted above. In Experiments 2 to 4, subjects were able to construct their own arrays to make conditional either true or false with any distribution of the four cases they wished to choose. The presence and absence of negative components was varied, as was the form of the conditional, being either "if then" as above or "only if": "The figure is green only if it is a triangle". The first findings was that subjects represent conditional in fuzzy way: conditional that include some counter-example TF cases (Experiment 1) may be rated as true, and such cases are often included when subjects construct an array to make the rule true (Experiments 2 to 4). Other findings included a strong tendency to include psychologically irrelevant FT and FF cases in constructed arrays, presumably to show that conditional statements only apply some of the time. A tendency to construct cases in line with the "matching bias" reported on analogous tasks in the literature was found, but only in Experiment 4, where the number of symbols available to construct each case was controlled. The findings are discussed in relation to the major contemporary theories of conditional reasoning based upon inference rules and mental models, neither of which can account for all the results.

The source of belief bias effects in syllogistic reasoning.

In studies of the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning, an interaction between logical validity and the believability of the conclusion has been found; in essence, logic has a larger effect on unbelievable than on believable conclusions. Two main explanations have been proposed for this finding. The selective scrutiny account claims that people focus on the conclusion and only engage in logical processing if this is found to be unbelievable; while the misinterpreted necessity account claims that subjects misunderstand what is meant by logical necessity and respond on the basis of believability when indeterminate syllogisms are presented. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the predictions of these two theories by examining whether the interaction would disappear if only determinate syllogisms were used. It did, thus providing strong support for the misinterpreted necessity explanation. However, the results are also consistent with a version of the mental models theory, and so Experiment 3 was carried out to compare these two explanations. The mental models theory received strong support, as it did also in the follow-up Experiments 4 and 5. It is concluded that people try to construct a mental model of the premises but, if there is a believable conclusion consistent with the first model they produce, then they fail to construct alternative models.

A study of two "quick-and-easy" methods of assessing individual differences in student learning.

A study is reported which examined the reliability and validity of two measures of individual differences in learning, a short form of the Approaches to Studying Inventory (Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983) and the Learning Style Inventory (Kolb, 1976). Both of these are short and easy to administer, making them attractive for use in the classroom. The Approaches to Studying Inventory was found to be a potentially useful measure: the predicted factors emerged, the scales were moderately reliable and those students adopting a deep approach to learning were more likely to be successful in their exams. The Learning Style Inventory, on the other hand, was relatively unreliable and the underlying factor structure did not correspond to what was predicted; there was, however, a correlation between scores on the active/passive dimension and academic success. It is concluded that the short form of the Approaches to Studying Inventory has some potential in assessing the learning styles of students, but that further refinement is required before it is adopted for general use.

The effect of set size on the interpretation of quantifiers used in rating scales.

Two studies are reported which investigated how people interpret quantifiers of amount such as are commonly used in questionnaires and rating scales. The results indicated that the interpretation of certain quantifiers and rating scales. The results indicated that the interpretation of certain quantifiers varied depending on the context in which they occurred. Low-magnitude quantifiers (e g, 'few', 'several') seemed to signify a much greater proportion when they described small set sizes than when they described relatively large ones. This means that it will be virtually impossible to find quantifiers for use in rating scales which achieve the desirable property of interval scaling. Despite this, some quantifiers are clearly more consistent in their interpretation and more appropriate to use than others, and recommendations are made as to the best ones to use in different situations.