Interests; *Student Motivation; *Teacher Attitudes IDENTIFIERS Middle School Students

The relationship between teachers ' and students' personal constructs regarding intrinsic motivation in the mathematics class were examined in this study. Participants were six middleschool mathematics teachers and 30 students from 5 classes. Videotape, direct observation, individual interviews, and repertory grid tasks focused on the ways in which teachers attempted to build their students ' motivations into their lessons, and the belief systems of teachers vs. students. Recent mathematics activities for each class served as elements for construct elicitation in the repertory grid task. Teachers and students were presented with random pairs of activities and were asked to determine what made one activity more fun than the other. Responses (constructs) were entered into a computer program that paired each activity with each construct and asked participants to rate how well each construct described eac