Title:

Mathematics Motivation in Students Enrolled in an Introductory Biology Course

Over the last two decades, the field of biology has become increasingly more quantitative leading to more mathematics being integrated into biology education curriculum. However, students enrolled in biology courses often report having negative feelings towards mathematics. To understand these negative feelings, this study used cluster analysis to identify patterns of mathematics motivation among undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory biology course at a large research-intensive university. For data, we used a survey, derived from Expectancy Value Theory, students completed at the beginning of the course that investigated six affective variables: expectancy of success, utility value, intrinsic value, mathematics attainment value, effort cost, and emotional cost. The findings show that students in the introductory biology course can be clustered into three groups (low, moderate, and high motivation), with over half in the moderate motivation cluster. For future analysis, we plan to further explore these groups by investigating predictor variables (gender and pre-professional status) for these cluster groups.

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