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Effects of an inquiry-focused school improvement program on the development of pupils’ attitudes towards curiosity, their implicit ability and effort beliefs, and goal orientations

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Abstract

The present study describes the effects of a 2-year inquiry-focused school improvement intervention on pupils’ attitudes towards epistemic curiosity, their implicit beliefs about the malleability of their ability, their effort beliefs, and their goal orientation motivations were investigated. Six Dutch primary school teams participated in the study. Quantitative data were collected from the 4th, 5th and 6th grade pupils and examined based on a longitudinal pretest–posttest control group design. A Structural Equation Modeling approach was first used to examine the relationships among pupils’ attitude, belief, and motivation scores. In line with attitude and motivation theory, pupils’ attitudes towards epistemic curiosity and their implicit ability beliefs positively related to their effort beliefs and goal orientation motivations. In addition, the intervention affected positive changes in pupils’ attitude, belief and motivation scores over time. Findings may inform the further development of school development projects aimed at stimulating pupils’ inquiry in primary education, namely by fostering pupils’ attitudes towards epistemic curiosity and their implicit ability beliefs.

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Notes

  1. Please note that the relations among attitudes, beliefs and motivations (and behavior) may be reciprocal as well (Vogel and Wänke 2016), since pupils’ confirmatory experiences with inquiry may in turn positively influence attitude and motivation change (e.g., Post and Walma van der Molen 2018a; Keong and Hirst 2010). For example, pupils’ experience that one’s epistemic curiosity behavior indeed brings about positive learning outcomes may lead them to develop a more positive attitude towards epistemic curiosity. However, we ignored these complexities for theoretical and methodological reasons.

  2. It should be noted that the association of implicit ability beliefs with motivation is complex and has been described using different mediators (e.g., Tempelaar et al. 2015; Van Aalderen-Smeets and Walma van der Molen 2018, 2018). As discussed before, we ignored these complexities for theoretical and methodological reasons.

  3. Post and Walma van der Molen (in press) indicate that the (same) delayed intervention for the control group was incidentally hindered by several school factors (e.g., teachers felt discontent with one of the teacher trainers, new lesson methods were introduced in a school during the program that demanded too much attention of the teachers). As a result, the teachers in the control group generally showed limited improvements in their inquiry teaching practices during the intervention.

  4. Please note that, among all three intervention schools, all individual teachers showed largely similar (increases in their) inquiry teaching behavior scores during the program (Post and Walma van der Molen in press). Partly because of this result, we disregarded the assessment of school-specific and classroom-specific effects at the pupil level.

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Funding

TechYourFuture, center of expertise in technology education, funded the research reported in the manuscript. TechYourFuture was not involved with the study design; with the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data; with the writing of the manuscript; nor with the decision to submit the article for publication.

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  1. Centre of Science Education and Talent Development, Institute for Teacher Education, Science Communication & School Practices, University of Twente, PO Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Tim Post & Juliette H. Walma van der Molen

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  1. Tim Post
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Correspondence to Tim Post.

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Appendices

Appendix

Survey instrument

The items are translated from Dutch. All response options to the items were 1–4, with 1 labelled ‘strongly disagree’ and 4 labelled ‘strongly agree’.

See Tables 5 , 6 , 7 and 8 .

Table 5 Items for measuring attitude towards epistemic curiosity
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Table 6 Items for measuring implicit beliefs about the malleability of intelligence
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Table 7 Items for measuring effort beliefs
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Table 8 Items for measuring achievement goal orientation motivation
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Post, T., van der Molen, J.H.W. Effects of an inquiry-focused school improvement program on the development of pupils’ attitudes towards curiosity, their implicit ability and effort beliefs, and goal orientations. Motiv Emot 45, 13–38 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-020-09851-5

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