Browsing by Author "Salminen, Marko"

The objective of this thesis is to examine, if the number of pupils receiving intensified support and special support has connection on the learning motivation of academically gifted pupils and pupils with above average reasoning abilities, and whether there are differences between these groups. In addition, the effect of gender on learning motivation was studied. The MetrOP material collected in 2011 and 2014 has been used as material for the thesis. In 2011 the answers were collected from pupils in the 7th grade, and in 2014 from pupils in the 9th grade. The pupils were from the 14 municipalities of the Helsinki metropolitan region. The sample set are pupils (N=5353), who were in classes, where there was data available on both intensified and special support pupils. In the thesis there is comparison on the differences between the learning motivation of academically gifted pupils (N=260), and pupils with above average reasoning abilities (N=281). This comparison was made by dividing the pupils in groups, where either there were no pupils requiring support (group 1), there were two or fewer pupils requiring support (group 2), or there were more than two pupils requiring support (group 3). The differences in learning motivation was compared by one way variance analysis using eleven different motivational variables. The effect of the number of intensified and special support pupils on the learning motivation of gifted pupils was studied separately. According to the results of the thesis, over half of the academically gifted pupils, and pupils with above average reasoning abilities were from classes that had no pupils requiring support on them. The number of pupils requiring support had a correlation on the learning motivation of both academically gifted pupils, and pupils with above average learning abilities. Especially in group 2 there were negative connections to pupils in group 1. The pupils in group 2 were more avoidance oriented, ego-oriented, performance oriented and believed more in chance and natural abilities in results when compared with pupils from group 1. The number of pupils requiring intensified support had a connection to the learning motivation of gifted pupils. There was no such correlation between the number of pupils requiring special support and learning motivation of gifted pupils. Gender had a measurable effect in learning motivation, where males were more susceptible to changes in the gender structure than females. The results are interesting, as the number of pupils requiring intensified support had an effect, but the number of pupils requiring special support had no effect on learning motivation. As a point of future research, it would be interesting to look into the effect of education level of parents on the learning motivation of pupils.