Vocational high school students’ motivation towards learning chemistry

Abstract

This paper describes the first-year and the third-year vocational high school students’ motivation to learning chemistry. Ninety vocational high school students participated in a validation process of a set of questionnaire consisted of 35 statements. This set of questionnaires was planned to be used to describe students’ motivation towards learning of chemistry. Six factors of motivation were analyzed in the questionnaires, i.e. self-efficacy, active learning strategies, science learning value, performance goal, achievement goal and learning environment stimulation. A Likert scale model was used to assess the students responses to the statements in the questionnaires. The students’ responses were ranged from 1 (strongly disagree), 2 (disagree), 3 (no opinion), 4 (agree) to 5 (strongly agree). Sixty five first year students and sixty six third-year students from vocational high school majoring in automotive technique participated in the study. The map of motivation towards chemistry of both first-year and third-year students’ were in the level of moderate-motivation. Although the average scores of all statements were different, the first-year students were a slightly lower than those of third-year students. The result of this study can be used to obtain the level of student’s motivation toward chemistry and teachers can use it to maintain or increase the students’ motivation in learning chemistry.