Students’ motivation and engagement in higher education: the importance of attitude to online learning
By Justine Ferrer, Allison Ringer, Kerrie Saville, Melissa A Parris, Kia Kashi. Higher Education, 2020
331 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The emergence of online environments has changed the landscape of educational learning. Some students thrive in this learning environment, but others become amotivated and disengaged. Drawing on self-determination theory, we report the findings of a study of 574 undergraduate business students at an Australian higher education institution on their attitude toward online learning, and its impact on their motivation and educational engagement. Data was collected via an e-mail survey and analysed using structural equation modelling and the Hayes’ bootstrapping method. The results of the study were mixed. Attitude to online learning mediated the relationships of both intrinsic motivation to know and extrinsic motivation with engagement, indicating that the design of online learning environments can play a role in enhancing learning experiences. However, attitude to online learning was not found to mediate the intrinsic motivation to accomplish and engagement relationship. A negative mediation effect was partially supported between amotivation and engagement, with study mode found as a moderated mediator to this effect, being stronger and significant for online students as opposed to on-campus students. These results have implications for how students can be engaged online, and the need for educators to design online learning environments that support the learning experience for all students.
Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Education, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/839557f66422bfa08ca2a8f6e055a16e1ace3081
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Education
Citations in the corpus
- Higher Education Students’ Perceptions of Online Learning during COVID-19—A Comparative Study (2021, background): “These studies considered a number of perspectives: student learning outcomes; student motivation and engagement; the importance of attitude [16]; learning platforms and related challenges [4].”
- Student engagement in online learning in Latin American higher education during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A systematic review (2022, background): “Positive attitude and previous experience with online learning platforms are found to be a strong indicator for student satisfaction and affective engagement (Ferrer et al., 2022; Kovačević et al., 2021).”