Abstracts - Earli

materials used in physics classes influence students’ mood, motivation, and performance.Therefore, an experiment was conducted with students from secondary school (7th and 8th grade).Subjects were randomly assigned to a two-factor design with the factor "illustration withdecorative pictures" and the factor "illustration with instructional pictures". Participants wereasked to read a text on physics. Before passing the learning material to the students’, priorknowledge, intelligence and individual interest in physics was measured in order to control theirinfluence on the results. Achievement emotions, motivation, effort (learning time), and cognitiveload were measured during reading. Afterwards, the learning performance was assessed using amultiple-choice knowledge test. This test consisted of two different scales, one for memoryperformance (recall scale) and one for transfer knowledge (comprehension scale). Results indicatethat decorative pictures are not only ‘seductive details’, but have emotional and motivationaleffects. If these pictures are attractive and evoke high arousal they are beneficial for learning. Inconclusion, illustrating learning materials with decorative pictures provides a viable method toincrease learning results through a simple change in the learning environment. Practicalimplications for the design of learning materials are discussed.The role of goal orientation in learning quantitative research methodsPertti Vaisanen, University of Joensuu, FinlandHarri Pitkaniemi, University of Joensuu, FinlandThe purpose of the present study was to examine how general and domain-specific goalorientations, general self-efficacy, self-perceived course-specific competence, expectancies ofsuccess, and learning efforts are interrelated, and their impact on cognitive and affective learningoutcomes in applied statistics for undergraduate students (N = 160). The data was collected inthree phases of the course ‘Quantitative Research Methods 1’ designed for teacher educationstudents in an eastern Finland university. Using Skaalvik’s (1997) and Elliot and Church’s (1997)instruments the students’ general goal orientations were measured, as well as their perceptions ofthemselves as statistics learners using a 30-item Likert-type inventory (Students’ Perceptions ofThemselves as Learners of Statistics, Väisänen et al., 2004) at the beginning of the course. Halfwaythrough the course, the students’ domain-specific goal orientations were measured using thesame instruments as in the beginning, but now students were instructed to focus on this specificcourse when responding. In the last phase of the course, students responded to an instrumentinvestigating their learning efforts and affective learning experiences (a Likert type 45-itemquestionnaire Learning Process and Affective Outcomes, Väisänen et al., 2004). The course gradeand self-evaluated success were used to indicate the cognitive learning outcomes. Themeasurements proved to be reliable with reasonably high reliability estimates ranging from .70 to.88 when measuring goal orientations and .79 - .91 in the other areas. Multitrait-multimethodcorrelational analyses, ordinary zero-order correlations and factor analyses lent support to theconstruct validity as well as to the concurrent and discriminant validity of the instruments. Resultsidentified three clusters of students who were labelled Avoidance oriented, Performance–Learningoriented and Learning oriented. Different profiles of study success and stability of groupmembership were apparent when comparing general and domain-specific goal orientations.Supporting previous research, task and mastery orientation best predicted cognitive outcomes.Academic interest as identity regulation: Why girls turn away from scienceUrsula Kessels, Freie Universität Berlin, GermanyOur research is based on the assumption that the development of academic interests plays a crucialrole for adolescents’ identity regulation in general. The present study focuses on explaining why– 334 –