Thinking styles, motivational orientations, and academic achievement in learning physics among Hong Kong secondary school students

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to investigate the nature of thinking styles as it relates to style value and style malleability through examining the relationships between thinking styles, motivational orientations, and academic achievement in learning physics among secondary school students in Hong Kong. Specifically, the research aimed to determine whether or not teaching styles change students’ thinking styles, and if so, the association of these changes on students’ motivational orientations; and to determine the extent to which motivational orientations and thinking styles link academic achievement in physics. This quantitative research employed a quasi-experimental longitudinal design and was composed of one pilot study and one main study. The pilot study purposed to evaluate the two inventories used in the main study: the Motivational Orientation Scales in Learning Physics (MOSLP) and the Thinking Styles Inventory Revised II (TSI-R2). A total of 76 secondary school students participated in the pilot study. Results revealed that the MOSLP and the TSI-R2 were applicable to Hong Kong school students. The main study was an experimental study aimed at determining the impact of teaching styles on students’ thinking styles, motivational orientations, and academic achievement in physics. A total of six teachers and 449 secondary students constituted the experimental group, and five teachers and 347 students constituted the control group. The intervention, involved students in physics lessons instructed under Type I teaching styles, was implemented in each participating teacher’s school for one semester. Pre-and post-tests were conducted, in which students’ thinking styles and motivational orientations were measured by the TSI-R2 and the MOSLP respectively. Students’ physics examination results were also collected at the time of the post-test. A series of statistical analyses were conducted to reveal the effects of thinking styles on motivational orientations, to identify changes in students’ thinking styles, and to determine their relationships with academic achievement in both the experimental and control groups. Overall results demonstrated that Type I thinking styles were positively associated with task orientation and negatively connected with work avoidance orientation, thus which indicated adaptive value of Type I styles; Type II styles were not particularly associated with any of the motivational orientation scales, which suggested that they were value-differentiated; and Type III styles were found to be associated with ego orientation (in the pre-test), which suggested that they had less adaptive value. Moreover, students in the experimental group unexpectedly demonstrated a decreasing trend in their use of some Type I styles, some maladaptive Type II styles, and some Type III thinking styles for learning physics, whereas students in the control group decreased their use of some Type III thinking styles. Also, reduction in ego orientation among students in the experimental group was found to be greater than that of the control group. Finally, results demonstrated that teaching styles played a mediating role in boosting academic achievement. Students in the experiment and control groups studying in different forms modified either their thinking styles or motivational orientations. The magnitudes of these changes positively associated with students’ levels of achievement in physics.