Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish first-year engineering students' motivational values and beliefs about the nature of mathematics

Abstract

We report from a Nordic research project that has investigated first-year engineering students in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and the relationships between their task performance, motivational values, and beliefs about the nature of mathematics. The present paper focuses on the covariance between their motivational values and beliefs from the perspectives of gender and nationality. The results show that female students' motivational values are more strongly related to their beliefs than is the case for male students. Further, the Finnish students' motivational values are only weakly related to their beliefs, whereas the Norwegian and the Swedish students' motivation to mathematics is quite strongly related to how much they appreciate the applications of mathematics.