Keyword: motivation

ABSTRACT: Traditional education alone is no longer adequate to prepare students for the challenges of a globalized and diverse society within the context of sustainable development. The European Higher Education Area places a strong emphasis on educational methodologies to achieve its goal of fostering the holistic development of university students as competent professionals and responsible citizens and cooperative learning appears to be a more effective methodological approach to address this evolving reality. This study explores whether a collaborative learning approach promotes meaningful learning and skill development among university students. We compared two groups using different learning strategies: traditional and cooperative. The statistical analysis was conducted in two phases. First, a survey was distributed to students in both groups. A t-test was then applied to examine the differences between the two groups. The findings indicate that the cooperative group outperformed the traditional group in terms of motivation, personal skills, and self-assessment confirming that cooperative learning is more effective in developing the skills necessary for a sustainable society.

ABSTRACT: Anxiety about learning mathematics and accompanying low grades in mathematics has caused many students to the extent that they wish never to learn mathematics again. This level of apathy epitomised by students’ demotivated participation and low performance in learning mathematics reflects the general level of learning despondency among adolescent students. Although the literature suggests that the tide of learning despondency can be assuaged if students’ achievement motivation is heightened, studies exploring the mathematics achievement motivation of high school students in Ghana are scarce. To address this gap in the literature, this study, conducted within a positivist paradigm, focused on examining the relationship between perceived mathematics learning, achievement motivation, and mathematics anxiety while controlling for learning styles and gender of 322 high school students. The results showed that the motivation to strive and the motivation to participate were respectively the most substantial and minor drivers of students’ mathematics achievement motivation. Based on the correlation and regression analysis, achievement motivation positively predicted mathematics learning whiles both achievement motivation and mathematics learning were negatively related to mathematics anxiety. The study’s results further showed that mathematics anxiety dampened the extent to which achievement motivation positively influenced mathematics learning in the regression analysis.