Motivation Factors for Elementary School Students

Abstract

It is not hard to recognise motivated student. He is interested, curious, active, enthusiastic and does not give up when encounters difficulties, but thinks for further education. Motivation during schooling is highly related to a student’s later academic achievement and it is therefore very important to encourage it. This paper discusses the motivation factors and affective component for elementary school students. The empirical research has been carried out through a questionnaire based on the instrument Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) designed and adjusted for researching intrinsic goal orientation, extrinsic goal orientation and anxiety of Croatian elementary school students (1st – 4th grade). The sample of this research consisted of 311 primary school students from rural (N = 103) and urban (N = 208) primary schools. The research was conducted during 2019 in several Croatian counties. The aim of the paper is to determine levels of three motivation factors: intrinsic goal orientation, extrinsic goal orientation and anxiety as an important predictor of future academic success. Secondary goal is to determine differences according to gender, age and the living environment of students. The results had shown that the overall level of motivation of the participants is high from which it is evident that students are highly motivated to work, especially female students. The results also show high level of intrinsic goal orientation, higher level of extrinsic goal orientation and test anxiety comparing to Duncan et. al. (2015) results.