Students, teachers and parents from different cultural background often have slightly different values, ideals and expectations. These values affect on everyday life in the school environment in many ways. I have been teaching in multicultural school environments for the last twelve years. For the last five years I have worked as a deputy head at the European School of Luxembourg. At present this school has 3,650 pupils, 420 teachers and 11 official languages and language sections. I observe cultural differences on a daily basis and must often solve problems based on these differences.
The present study assesses self-regulated aptitudes, motivational orientations and the use of learning strategies among secondary students from three different international schools in Finland and Luxembourg. The students in this study represent 14 nationalities (see Table 4.0.3) and they are mainly taught in one of four languages (Finnish, German, English and French). It was useful and interesting to find out if there would be significant differences between the schools in the questionnaire results. It is necessary to point out, that the questionnaires used in this study were not designed to measure cultural differences in the first place.
To understand the results of this study it is necessary to take a closer look at some aspects of the cultural and situational differences of learning. According to Little (1998), the constraints, values and naturally occurring contingencies embedded in the overarching sociocultural fabric of any given society guide children’s achievement behaviour and shape their related beliefs. Some factors operate in similar ways in many different cultures, whereas others emerge in their own, unique, indigenous forms (Salili, 1994). This suggests that it might be possible for people in different cultural contexts to develop sets of cognitive, emotional and
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motivational patterns that enable them to function adaptively in situations that are common and recurrent in those cultures (see also Niemivirta et al., 2001).
Weiner (1990) concluded that motivation must be considered within the context of social values and super-ordinate culture. Hickey and McCaslin (2001) compare and analyse the concept of ‘contextual motivation’ in the three different epistemological perspectives corresponding to the theories associated with Skinner, Piaget and Vygotsky. They label them as behavioural/empiricist, cognitive/rationalist and situative/sociocultural theories.
Even though the main theories and the main instrument used in this study (MSLQ) clearly share the values of the cognitive/rationalist theories, I have taken the liberty of expanding the vision towards situative/sociocultural perspectives.
Traditionally, it is assumed that behaviour is determined by individual goals and needs with limited influence from others or from the environmental context (see Jackson et al., 2000). It is also claimed that the focus on the self is primarily derived from the western, i.e. European, male-dominant culture that encourages indi- viduals to be ‘autonomous, self-directing, unique and assertive and to value privacy of choice’ (see Jackson et al., 2000; Kim et al., 1994). Social context calls upon individuals to adapt their behaviour toward group-oriented goals: ‘Individuals direct their behaviour to achieve goals that are beneficial to their social network affiliations (e.g. organisations, families) as well as for their individual gain’
(Jackson et al., 2000).
In Chapter 2, a social-cognitive perspective on learning is presented in viewing self-regulation as an interaction of personal, behavioural and environmental triadic processes (Bandura, 1986; Zimmerman, 2000.). Environmental self-regulation refers to the observation and adjustment of environmental conditions and outcomes.
Environmental and personal processes interact bi-directionally in naturalistic settings (see Figure 2.1.1). That is why Zimmerman (2000) suggests that individuals who fail to use social and physical environmental resources or who view them as an
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obstacle to personal development will be less effective in regulating their lives.
Internal views of self-regulatory functioning, such as will-power beliefs, are often based on insufficient information about the social and environmental nature of skilled functioning (Ericsson and Charness, 1994; Newman, 1994; Thoresen and Mahoney, 1974).
The social environment influences all the phases of self-regulation (see Figure 2.1.1). Individuals form standards for self-evaluative judgement on the basis of instruction, social feedback and modelling from peers, parents, teachers and coaches (Zimmerman, 2000). The social and physical environment is viewed, from the social cognitive point of view, as a resource for self-enhancing forethought, performance or volitional control and self-reflection (c.f. Figure 2.2.2).
According to Hickey and McCaslin (2000), the cognitive/rationalist view of learning is in terms of an intrinsic sense-making process in which ‘the engagement in learning occurs quite naturally when experience is inconsistent with current understanding. Therefore engagement in learning is a function of prior knowledge, experience and understanding, relative to the environment in which learning is expected to take place.’ Social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986; 1989) has provided a theoretical basis for the development of a model of self-regulated learning in which personal, contextual and behavioural factors interact in such a way as to give the students an opportunity to control their learning while at the same time setting limits to self-direction. According to Hickey and McCaslin (2000), there are aspects of social cognitive theory that are consistent with empiricist, rationalist and sociocultural perspectives; however they argue that many of the key elements of situative/sociocultural perspectives cannot be captured within social cognitive models.
Some researchers who consider motivation from a sociocultural perspective (e.g.
Järvelä and Niemivirta, 1999; Op’t Eynde et al., 2001) argue for a continued reliance on individually-oriented constructs such as self-regulation as well as the
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enhanced study of social and environmental preconditions and interactions (see Hickey and McCaslin, 2000, p. 44).
According to Volet (2001), there is growing empirical evidence of cognitive, motivational, volitional and emotional sensitivity to tasks and activities in relation to relatively stable factors and macro-level contextual influences (Boekaerts, 1997;
1999; Schiefele and Csikszentmilhalyi, 1995; Volet, 1997) and of knowledge structures activated in response to situational cues and circumstances (Boekaerts and Niemivirta, 2000; Pintrich, 2000a).
The data collected for this study was investigated in the light of four different cultural dimensions of the learning environment: individualism/collectivism, power distance, uncertainly avoidance and masculinity/femininity (see Table 5.1.1). The results of this analysis are presented in Section 5.1; they are discussed in Section 7.0 and my conclusions are presented in Section 8.0.