The relationship between variables that represent motivation and achievement in post-secondary mathematics

This dissertation consists of a theoretical study and three empirical studies. The theoretical study addressed the question of how to constitute a motivation questionnaire for investigating the relationship between motivation and academic achievement. The dissertation argued that for a consistent questionnaire, we must turn to the properties of variables. Using object properties, this dissertation classified achievement variables into three categories: motivators, mediators, and moderators and proposed a moderated-mediation model (Hayes, 2013) as a framework for investigating the relationship between motivation and academic achievement. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were classified as mediators, while self-efficacy belief, self-determination and anxiety about mathematics were classified as moderators of academic achievement.The proposed framework was implemented through a mediation and a moderated-mediation analysis. With motivation as predictor, academic achievement as outcome, and intrinsic or extrinsic motivation as mediating variables, this dissertation imagined a mediation path diagram (Baron & Kenny, 1986) as a triangle of vectors in equilibrium, and argued that the feasibility of mediation implicitly assures the feasibility of reverse mediation; that suppression might be interpreted as reverse mediation (study 2).With mathematics self efficacy belief as a dependent variable, a stepwise multiple regression showed that pride, academic interest, academic achievement goals and hope accounted for 62.2% of variance in mathematics self-efficacy belief. A discriminant anlaysis showed that pride, academic interest, and academic achievement goals discriminates between students with low and high mathematics self-efficacy beliefs. With both results, this dissertation argued that motivation variables might be the drivers of persistence often associated with strong self-efficacy belief; that persistence might be a reflective indicator of motivation (study 3).The goal of empirical study 1 was to determine the set of indicators that accounts for most variance in a student’s academic achievement. This goal was not realized perhaps due to unexpected poor correlation statistics between the indicators of motivation and student’s final grades as observed in this dissertation. This dissertation concludes that both the proposed and related research frameworks may only be used to compare groups of students, rather than individual students (Bandura, 2001).