Research on Student Motivation III

Chapter six

Research methodology

This study is for finding out the factors that are driving student motivation at the university level. For doing the research a questionnaire should be developed that contains questions relevant to the research’s objective. Then the data would be collected from the students and the students giving data should be selected from both senior and junior batches. The research questions require answers from students having all kinds of backgrounds, gender, seniority level or CGPA status. So collecting samples through a relevant questionnaire is the best option here.

This research is conducted on the Department Of International Business, University Of Dhaka. The survey instrument used consisted of 17 questions on motivation to study and 5 questions on student background. The background information compiled included gender, age, GPA, and residential status. The surveys are administered by the researchers during the month of May, 2014 in classes that were offered in the department during that semester. The students surveyed in the accelerated program were chosen by convenience (they were available during the survey period).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter seven

Data Analysis

After all of the surveys were complete, the data were compiled for the 37 student participants.

The data for each question on motivation were first correlated with the data for student GPA to seek significant relationships between motivating factors and academic performance. Strong correlations were calculated between GPA ranges and responses to each of the questions on the survey. High GPAs (over 3.0) were significantly correlated (at α = .05) with the motivating factors of grades and self -learning. Low GPAs (under 2.5) were correlated significantly (at the .05 level) with concerns over family obligations or fear of failing. Taken on their own, these results might imply that the high-performing students are driven by the need to achieve academic success and the lower-performing students by fear of failure. This connection might be spurious.

However, since the students responding to the questions already had either high or low GPAs, their responses to the survey questions could have been driven by their current placement in the academic pecking order – not the motivators affecting the study habits that caused the GPAs in the first place.

Finally, the questions on motivation were clustered according to how well they aligned with classical motivational theory. Questions were tagged as either corresponding to McGregor, Maslow or Herzberg. The discussion of the results of this analysis appears in the later chapter.