Student Motivation, Self-Beliefs And Expectations In Science: A Detailed View On European Countries

Student Motivation and self-beliefs have been a significant part of PISA since its beginning. Not only does the relation to student achievement make these factors so important, they also represent essential targets of schools or school systems respectively. How much young people are interested in different subjects, how deeply involved they are and which opinions they have regarding school and learning often determines future educational and occupational careers. High student motivation, self-beliefs and positive expectations are therefore a desirable output of schools. On the other side they represent conditions for learning in school – they build the context in which learning takes place. This analysis focuses on motivational factors, self-beliefs and expectations in science, as scientific literacy was the main domain of PISA 2006 and therefore a broad variety of context information is provided. Another crucial aspect is that first results of PISA 2006 showed that student motivation in science in most European countries is rather low, similar to science self-beliefs and value beliefs.