Filipino Students’ Reasons for Not Being Motivated in School: Insights into Their Implicit Beliefs About Motivation and Learning

Abstract

Motivation is an important multidimensional construct that is consistently associated with achievement in school, but few theories conceptualize students’ lack of motivation as an explicit dimension of motivation. The purpose of the study was to explore Filipino students’ reasons for not being motivated in school, and we explored these reasons by gathering open-ended questionnaire data from samples of Filipino students from the secondary and tertiary levels. Data from 405 high school students and 305 college/university students revealed core themes of reasons for not being motivated: beliefs and attitudes about the self and the subject, perceptions of the teacher’s competencies, and distractions afforded by social support systems. The findings are discussed in the context of current explicit theories on amotivation, but in addition, themes that are divergent with these explicit theories are discussed in the context of Filipino and Asian students’ implicit beliefs about motivation and learning in schools.