Evaluating Student Academic Motivations in One-year CubeSat Project using 3x 2 Achievement Goal Framework

Abstract

In 2012, National University of Singapore (NUS) started to develop Cubesats as an educational platform to teach and motivate engineering students from multidisciplinary backgrounds to apply their engineering knowledge and skills in real-life contexts. In this CubeSat project, students have the opportunity to work on an actual nanosatellite, which would be launched into space, as their Final Year Projects (FYPs) or one-year master projects with academic credits. In this paper, we investigated students' motivation to work on this project by measuring their achievement goals using a 3x2 achievement goal motivation questionnaire by Elliot, Murayama and Pekrun (2011). Nineteen engineering students were enrolled in our one-year CubeSat project and they were surveyed at the beginning, the middle and at the end of their projects. Students' overall motivation was found to be high but during the middle phase of the project, there was a dip in motivation. Overall, task-approach goal score was increased but their self-avoidance goal score increased faster than their self-approach goal score. There were also variations of students' other-approach and other-avoidance goal scores during the project process. These findings were discussed in relation to the instructional approach in CubeSat and the implications for enhancing students' real-life learning experiences.