Challenging the narratives of motivation : A study in students' driving forces in mathematics education
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The points of departure for this doctoral thesis are twofold: one is a set of studies on lower and middle primary students’ conceptions of mathematics teaching that formed the empirical basis of my licentiate thesis; the second is the discussion of students’ motivation developed there. From an epistemological perspective, the licentiate thesis was grounded in a predominantly individual–psychological view of teaching and learning. The results showed that students expressed a rich variety of emotions towards mathematics, encompassing both positive and negative feelings, as well as emotions of varying intensity, from strong to weak. They reported experiencing both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, suggesting that they were driven either by enjoyment of mathematics and a desire to work on mathematical tasks, or by an ambition to reach external goals. The results on motivation revealed nuances within the categories and contributed to the further development of existing theories. However, there is an ontological gap in how motivation and driving forces for learning are understood, which is of particular relevance to mathematics learning. On the one hand, there is a dominant and fundamentally psychological conception of learning as the transmission of existing knowledge to students understood as separate, autonomous individuals. On the other hand, there is a socioculturally grounded and historically developed view of teaching, in which learning is understood as inseparably intertwined with development and realised through activities in which students participate actively. A fundamental premise of this study is that agentive dimensions in mathematics learning, which are included in activity theory, can contribute to a different interpretation of the concept of motivation. From an activity theory perspective, it may be more productive to talk about the appropriation of an activity's motive as a driving force for students' engagement. Therefore, the overarching aim of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of how students’ driving forces for mathematics learning can be analysed and understood. In addition, it seeks to understand the design of the content of mathematical lessons, specifically in relation to task details and staging and enacting the communicational factors of teaching and learning situations. The two research questions in focus are: RQ 1: What qualitatively different ways of experiencing mathematics do students express and how can they be understood in relation to driving forces for doing school mathematics? RQ 2: How can questions of students’ agentive engagement be understood in relation to a drive for participation in mathematics education? Empirically, the thesis is based on two types of data. The first consists of an analysis of semi-structured interviews with 24 students—12 girls and 12 boys—from grades 8 and 9 in lower secondary school. The second consists of the design and observation of mathematics teaching, studied through the planning, enactment, and analysis of mathematics lessons across four iterations1. These lessons were conducted with Grade 7 students in four different classes at the same school and taught by the same teacher. The data material analysed for the thesis is heterogeneous in nature, and the overarching research questions are abstract. Consequently, several theories and methods have been applied. For interviews, phenomenography served as the primary analytical approach. For the lesson design, the main theoretical framework was learning activity theory, specifically the development and specification of activity theory with a focus on learning as an activity. It is also primarily within this theoretical framework that the concluding discussion is situated. The results show that: (1) Students do not describe mathematics as an activity in its own right, but rather as a series of loosely connected actions. From the students’ perspective, the overarching goal is to solve discrete tasks, questions, or problems, such as simple problem situations or as exercises, and to do so individually. (2) Students make few references to what can be interpreted as their own agency in relation to subject content or teaching. (3) With a lesson design based on learning activity theory, students participate in teaching and demonstrate a form of agency that goes beyond what was described in the interviews. (4) Four principles are central for good lesson design: creating a task with theoretical complexity; enabling students’ agency to develop motive for the mathematical activity; providing adequate theoretical tools that direct students’ senses towards crucial aspects of the mathematical learning object; and facilitating a space of collective memory where the collective theoretical work can be realised. Based on these results, the following implications for practice are identified in the thesis: (i) Students need to be offered teaching in which they can develop agency in relation to the content of mathematics. (ii) Such teaching needs to consist of an interplay between the task and the enactment of the task. The task represents the mathematical content and must contain the conditions for a theoretical exploration of mathematical structures and relations. The enactment is the interaction within the group—comprising teacher and students—in which the task is addressed. (iii) The teacher’s role in the enactment is to create conditions for the emergence of theoretical exploration, and then to support its development and ensure that it is inclusive.
Institution: Åbo Akademi University
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7163479390