The system of academic task values: The development of cross-domain comparisons of values and college major choice.

This study synthesizes theories of achievement motivation to better understand the development of academic task values in high school students and their relation to college major selection. We utilize longitudinal structural equation modeling to understand how grades relate to task values, how task values across domains relate to one another over time, and how the system of task values relates to college major choice. In our sample of 1,279 high students from Michigan, we find evidence that task value for math negatively relates to task value for English and vice versa.

The motivational system of task values and anticipated emotions in daily academic behavior.

This study integrates theories of achievement motivation and emotion to investigate daily academic behavior in an undergraduate online course. Using cluster analysis and hierarchical logistic regression, we analyze profiles of task values and anticipated emotions to understand expectations and completion of academic tasks over the duration of a week. Students' task specific interest, opportunity cost, and anticipated satisfaction and regret varied across tasks and were predictive of both their expectations of task completion and actual task completion reported the following day.

Teachers caring for students and students caring for math: The development of culturally and linguistically diverse adolescents' math motivation.

This study utilized growth curves and change models to understand the impact of student perceptions of teacher caring on the development of math motivation for an ethnically and linguistically diverse sample of adolescents in middle school (N = 1926) and high school (N = 1531). Using an expectancy-value framework, growth curves revealed declining math motivation for both middle school and high school cohorts. However, perceived teacher caring buffered against these declines and was positively associated with math self-efficacy and subjective task values.