Personal Meaning And Motivation When Learning Mathematics: A Theoretical Approach

Personal meaning, understood as the personal relevance of an object or an action (Vollstedt, 2011), seems to be closely related to motivation. However, the structural relationships between personal meaning and motivation are unexplored yet. Two motivation theories, self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2002) and expectancy-value theory (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), are used to work out these relations. The focus of this paper lies on theoretical considerations.