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Students’ Motivation for Standardized Math Exams

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 230B Education Building, 1310 South Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820; k-ryan6{at}uiuc.edu. Her research interests include educational accountability issues and high-stakes assessment

Allison M. Ryan, associate professor of educational psychology

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 230B Education Building, 1310 South Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820; ryan2{at}uiuc.edu. Her research interests include motivation and engagement and the intersection of social and academic concerns for students during early adolescence

Keena Arbuthnot, postdoctoral fellow and lecturer on education

Harvard Graduate School of Education, 13 Appian Way, 450 Gutman Library, Cambridge, MA 02138; arbuthke{at}gse.harvard.edu. Her research examines issues related to educational measurement, testing policy, and racial and gender achievement gaps

Maurice Samuels, doctoral student

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 230B Education Building, 1310 South Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820; msamuels{at}uiuc.edu. His research interests include the evaluation of school accountability systems at the school and state levels and the use of democratic and culturally responsive approaches in program evaluation

The recent No Child Left Behind legislation has defined a vital role for large-scale assessment in determining whether students are learning. Given this increased role of standardized testing as a means of accountability, the purpose of this article is to consider how individual differences in motivational and psychological processes may contribute to performance on high-stakes math assessments. The authors consider individual differences in processes that prior research has found to be important to achievement: achievement goals, value, self-concept, self-efficacy, test anxiety, and cognitive processes. The authors present excerpts from interviews with eighth-grade test takers to illustrate these different achievement-related motivational beliefs, affect, and cognitive processing. Implications for future research studying the situational pressures involved in high-stakes assessments are discussed.

Key Words: accountability • high-stakes testing • motivation

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