THE LOCUS OF MOTIVATION AND ACHIEVEMENT OF UNIVERSITY LEVEL STUDENTS

Abstract

Thesis Title: The locus of motivation and achievement of university level students in Pakistan. This study was undertaken to know about the locus of motivation and achievement of the university level students and to find out inter-relationship of male and female students. In order to collect data one questionnaire was used which was developed and tested by Dr. Russell F. Waugh, Edith Cowan University, Australia, with his permission to gather data for motivation and achievement. Its validity was confirmed by the group of experts and reliability was calculated through Cronbach Alpha on 100 students not included in the sample. The value of Cronbach Alpha comes out as 0.78. Then results of different students were collected to analyse the data to compare male and female students with their responses. The questionnaire had three main aspects of motivation, linked with two response sets (What I aim for and What I actually do), and an ordered set of subject response categories (none or only one of my subjects, in some, though not most of my subjects, in most, though not all, of my subjects, in all or nearly all of my subjects). Only seven universities were included in the sample which were willing to participate. Pearson Product moment correlation and t-test were used for analysis of the data. It was concluded that the majority of the university level students had the highest motivation level. It is also interesting fact that gender difference was found in the motivation level of male and female students. Data collected through questionnaire from 1267 students was analysed and tabulated. Three different departments (computer science, management department and social science departments) were chosen to collect data from male and female students. It was also concluded that there was positive correlation between motivation and academic achievement of the university level student and motivation and achievement level of male and female students was higher than that of female students. Another interesting fact was that from all these three aspects constituting the locus of motivation i.e. striving for excellence, desire to learn and personal incentives, the predominent aspect was personal incentives.