A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

28 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
Table 3.1 Reasons for studying
Percentage of students
Means to an end (66%)
Personal development (24%)
Stopgap (10%)
Improving standard of living. Improving chance of
getting a job. Developing career. Getting a good
qualification. Getting a worthwhile job.
Improving life skills. Reaching personal potential.
Gaining knowledge for its own sake. Furthering
academic interest. Gaining control of own life. Being
classified in this way.
Avoiding work. Laziness. Allowing time out to decide
on career. Social life. Fun and enjoyment.
While the classification was largely post hoc, and was carried out with incomplete
knowledge of existing educational theories of motivation, it is striking how similar our
classification is to those arrived at by other researchers. For example, a key distinction is
often made between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsically motivated students
enjoy a challenge, want to master the subject, are curious and want to learn; while
extrinsically motivated students are concerned with the grades they achieve, external
rewards and whether they will gain approval from others (Harter, 1981). While the fit is
not perfect, the parallels with our own classification system are clear, with intrinsic
motivation corresponding closely to personal development and extrinsic motivation
corresponding to means to an end.
Other major distinctions that have been made in the literature also map closely on to
our categorisation. Dweck and Elliott (1983) have drawn the highly influential distinction
between performance goals and learning goals. Performance goals are linked with means
to an end (and extrinsic motivation), while learning goals are linked with personal
development (and intrinsic motivation). Other distinctions in the literature related to
Dweck’s are those between ability and mastery goals (Nicholls, 1984). There are, of course,
important differences in emphasis in all these approaches (see Pintrich (2003) for an
overview) but there is enough similarity between them, and enough overlap with the
distinctions made in our own characterisation, to conclude that the concepts underlying
them are reasonably consistent and widespread.
AMOTIVATION AND ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION
Stopgap motivation was not especially common in our student sample, but it did occur.
A related concept, amotivation, has received some attention in the literature. Ryan and
Deci (2000) describe amotivated students as those who do not really know why they are
at university, think themselves incompetent and feel that they have little control over
what happens to them. In a real sense, then, these students show an absence of motivation.