Ask students if they think they can succeed in core academic subjects like English/language arts, science, and math, and many will say they are confident they can.
But their teachers aren’t nearly as sure.
A majority of secondary school students also said in a recent survey by the EdWeek Research Center that they are motivated to do their best in these classes. Yet while students report high levels of confidence and motivation in core academic subjects, teachers paint a far less rosy outlook.
Fifty-three percent of students said they were “very confident” that they could learn and succeed in their science-, technology-, engineering-, and math-related classes and 60 percent said the same about their English/language arts classes. In contrast, only about one in five secondary school teachers rated their students this year as “very confident” in their ability to tackle those subjects.
The EdWeek Research Center surveyed nationally representative groups of middle and high school students and K-12 educators, including 1,058 teens and 199 middle and high school teachers.
Are students’ perceptions of themselves as learners improving?
Previous research has largely found that for students in STEM classes, their confidence in their abilities tends to decrease as they get older, said Katherine Muenks, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas, Austin.
Muenks, who studies the impact of teachers, parents, and peers on students’ motivation, recently spoke with Education Week for a special report on students’ motivation in STEM subjects. Muenks said she was surprised to see how many students said they were confident in STEM-related classes in the EdWeek Research Center survey.
“Younger students start out being very confident and then their confidence levels, on average, do end up going down throughout high school,” she said. “Now, of course, that’s not true of every individual student. But I was kind of surprised by how many of them were either somewhat or very confident, especially very confident, given that they are middle school to high school [age].”
It could be a sign that students’ perceptions of themselves as learners are improving, at least in STEM, said Muenks.
“I do think some of these trends are starting to change,” she said. “A lot of the data that we use in some of these nationally representative data sets are a little bit older. So, I do think the cultural conversation is shifting around who’s good at math, who’s good at science, and I know that girls, in general, are doing better in school than boys across the board.”
Students and teachers agree: teachers are motivated
Students and teachers also have very different opinions about how motivated students are in their STEM and English/language arts classes. Fifty-nine percent of students said they were very motivated to do their best in their STEM and English/language arts classes, while 10% of STEM teachers and 7% of ELA teachers described their students as very motivated.
Teachers frequently cited cellphones, the pandemic, and a lack of expectations or support from home as sources of students’ lack of motivation in the open-ended response section of the survey.
“Since COVID closings, student motivation and engagement has been the lowest I have experienced in 20 years of teaching,” said a middle school science teacher in Kentucky.
“I’ve been teaching for almost 30 years and for the first 10-15 [years], kids didn’t change much,” said a high school English/language arts teacher from Maine. “After phones, the slide into students who are disengaged with even their own lives started and the pandemic fast tracked it.”
And according to a high school science teacher in North Carolina, “students often do not get the assistance and motivation to be successful at home. By the time they get to high school, many have only the desire to get out.”
One area of relative alignment among students and educators is how motivated their teachers are to teach them. Given the difference in perceptions between teachers and students about how motivated and confident students are, this alignment in their opinions stands out.
Fifty-eight percent of students said their STEM teachers were “very motivated” to do their best in teaching them, compared with 52% of STEM teachers who rated themselves as “very motivated” to do their best.
For English/language arts classes, 56 percent of students said their teachers were “very motivated” to teach them in those classes, while 45% of ELA teachers said they were “very motivated” to teach.
