Promoting Students' Motivation and Use of SRL Strategies in Online Mathematics Learning

Abstract

Computer and information technologies have brought revolutions to many aspects of our lives. Online learning is one of the new learning methods that have emerged with the development of new technologies. Even though the advantages of online learning are very attractive to students and educators, when they are applied in real educational settings, not all individuals that participate in online learning are successful; not all programs that are offered online attain their academic goals. This study was based on an experiment involving high school students from two high schools in China over about two weeks’ time. It evaluated the effectiveness of motivational and SRL design implemented in the online trigonometry function instructional system. Two hundred and thirty-six students participated in the study to test the effectiveness of the instructional design and 183 students completed the tasks through to the end. Participants were randomly divided into four groups: the motivational design group (MD); the SRL intervention group (SI); the SRL intervention and motivational design group (MDSI); and the control group (CT). Three sets of two-way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) were used to test the effectiveness of the motivational design and SRL intervention with the independent variables of group membership and gender. Research results showed that the motivational design using the ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction) model for students to learn trigonometry online is effective in enhancing students’ learning motivation online. The IMPROVE method was effective as an SRL intervention in the instructional design to promote students’ use of SRL strategies during their online learning activity. Both motivational design and SRL intervention were positively correlated to students’ academic achievement. But for students learning math online, motivation played a more important role in improving students’ academic achievement than SRL intervention. However, the group with both motivational design and SRL intervention showed the highest academic improvement compared with other two treatment groups.