Students' motivational attitudes in introductory STEM courses: The relationship between assessment and externalization

Work-in-Progress. Students' contextual motivation in introductory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses has been a focus of many recent studies; this work provides a new lens to this work by investigating students' situational motivations. Grounded theory is used to analyze survey responses from ten students in an introductory STEM course at a small private technical school that features project-based learning environments. Analysis resulted in an emerging relationship between assessment and a behavior we call externalization. We observe a co-occurrence between externalization and problem-set-related assessment; the co-occurrence indicates that some students may not feel as though they have control over their progress and performance on problem sets and it is this lack of control that the students report to be frustrating and amotivating. Additionally, we observe that blame is presented either as externalization or non-externalization while credit is almost always non-externalized. The two presentations of blame suggest that students might externalize to cope with negative affective experiences. The results of this study may have implication for design of STEM courses with motivations as both means and ends in students' learning processes.