Classroom Error Climate: Teacher Professional Development to Improve Student Motivation

Student motivation and achievement are often low for students from low socioeconomic status households and may decline when children from all walks of life enter middle school. Despite years of studies describing these declines and efforts to improve learning outcomes, the trends continue. Motivation has been studied from several theoretical standpoints, among them, self-efficacy, beliefs, goal orientations, and emotions. This dissertation introduces error orientation: how teachers and students react to and use errors in the classroom. A positive error orientation, one that views errors as opportunities to learn rather than punishments, may help improve students* emotions, self-efficacy, and future goal orientations, while aligning their beliefs in a more adaptive direction, thus reducing maladaptive academic motivation. A professional development design is proposed here to train teachers in using errors to the advantage of the learner by creating a positive error climate in their classrooms.

Author dc:creator

• O'Dell, Sean

Contributors dc:contributor

• Gill, Michele

• Error orientation; error climate; error handling; motivation; beliefs; emotions; achievement goal orientations; descriptive studies; professional development design
• Education
• Dissertations, Academic -- Education and Human Performance; Education and Human Performance -- Dissertations, Academic

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

CFE0005856

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-1703