Factors That Affect Student Motivation: A Full Guide 

Student motivation can be affected by several factors. These factors include teacher’s attitude, teacher’s classroom management skills, teaching methods, parent involvement, the personal interest of student, learning environment, self-esteem, their friends, etc.

Firstly we will discuss why motivation in student life is important. Learning is like most other tasks in that motivation is required to do your best. Motivation is among the most powerful determinants of students’ success or failure in school.

Motivation helps students to direct their attention towards the goal.

Highly Motivated students will be punctual to time and try to complete a task in an efficient way.

Motivation is divided into basic categories: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation comes from a person’s environment. On the other hand, Intrinsic motivation comes from internal sources. Intrinsically motivated students who want to learn because they are curious, seek knowledge, are interested in self-improvement, and learning gives them satisfaction. Students are motivated primarily by parental encouragement but as they grow motivators expand to include the anticipation rewards including praise, grades, money, gifts, or similar incentives.

Now we are going to talk about the factors that affect students’ motivation and motivational theories.

Parent’s involvement in a student’s life

Parents are the first teacher in a child’s life and the people whom a child listens to most. But nowadays parents set the targeted goals for their kids without knowing the interest of their kids, parents impose their dreams on their kids which makes a child feel stressed and unmotivated instead of this child at the age after 13 yrs should be treated more like a friend. Below this age parents focus on a few things, listen to the kids’ problems and try to solve that problem, showing interest in the child’s learning material, encourage the child to complete homework on time, attend the parent-teachers meeting. 

Curriculum Structure and Syllabus

 Higher-order learning involves problem-solving, critical thinking, evaluation and synthesis, and written and oral expression. The school curriculum should be Most motivational models of student achievement do not incorporate cognitive skills or strategies in their models. To help students feel more secure, educators need to plan classes and curriculum. All materials that will be used in class should be prepared in advance.

Classroom climate

A  sample item from the teacher-related environmental factors subscale is: “In this class, mistakes are considered a normal part of learning/In this class mistakes are considered a sign that students can’t learn”, and from the peer-related environmental factors sub-scale.

Teachers attitude and behavior

Teachers’ behavior and attitude play an important part in the learning of a student. If a student has a negative emotion such as fear or disliking towards their teacher, that can negatively affect their attitude toward the subject as a whole. Teachers should have a calm and cool temperament and should always speak in a polite tone with children. 

Student Interest

Student Interest is the main factor. Nowadays students find this thing difficult about their interest. It is better to participate in many other activities like sports, painting, debates, etc. So that student will discover their interest and start working on their specific goal. It’s the most important that a student will choose their interest as their career. As this thing will highly motivate the student instead of pressurizing and demotivating students parents should help their kids to find their interests and motivate them to work for their interests only.

Now let’s talk about some theories

According to self-determination theory, students’ motivation for academic performance varies in both strength and quality, and both variations predict learning, achievement, and continuation to college. 

Achievement Goal Theory Just as self-determination is important to student motivation,  so are student’s goals. Both sets of characteristics help us to explain the reasons why students engage in school-related tasks. 

Achievement goals and perceived ability. The learning scale was used to assess four types of student achievement goals: learning, performance approach,performance-avoidance,  and future goals/perceived instrumentality. An additional sub-scale addresses students’ perceived ability in the course. 

These are the factors that affect student motivation.