Fractal Project: Effects of a Teaching Intervention on Students’ Motivation for Science Learning

The present study aimed to examine whether student motivation changes or remains relatively stable after the completion of a teaching intervention of one school year duration focused on the study and understanding of fractals of their everyday world. There were 122 participant high school students of 10th and 11th grade. The tool used to assess student motivation before and after the teaching intervention towards learning in Science in this study, was the Students' Motivation towards Science Learning (SMTSL) questionnaire by Tuan et al. (2005a). It allows for six different motivational factors to be examined: Self-efficacy, active learning strategies, Science learning value, achievement goals, performance goals, and learning environment stimulation. Moreover, student motivation in three different school subjects was examined: Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The comparison of motivational factors was made between the experimental group and the control group. The findings of the statistical analyses, reveal that before the intervention the means of the motivational variables in the two groups did not differ; however, after the intervention, the motivational factors of the experimental group improved significantly in comparison to the motivational factors of the control group, which, on the contrary, decreased, with some exceptions.