The role of classroom social environment in shaping high school students’ physics motivation

Abstract

Students' drive to engage with physics shapes how strongly students engage with the subject, persist through setbacks, and ultimately perform academically, yet little empirical work has examined how features of the classroom's social climate contribute to this motivation. This study examines how three social-climate factors feeling recognized, feeling accepted, and interacting with classmates relate to two outcomes central to physics learning, namely how interested and how confident senior high school students are in the subject. A cross-sectional survey gathered responses from 423 students drawn from 13 public and private senior high schools in West Sulawesi, Indonesia, and the collected data were processed through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The analysis shows that both feeling accepted in class and interacting with peers positively and significantly shape students' interest and confidence in physics, whereas perceived recognition only strengthens self-efficacy without meaningfully affecting interest. The proposed model explained 48.2% of the varience in physics interest and 51.6% of the varience in physics self-efficacy, indicating a moderate degree of explanatory power. Overall, the findings highlight that a socially supportive classroom especially one where students experience a solid sense of belonging and substantive peer engagement plays a key role in fostering students' motivation to learn physics.