GPA & Motivation

Project Summary

I initiated this research as a project for Research and Data Analysis in Psychology course at UC Berkeley. As I am a student in a very enthusiastic school, I have been interested with the academic strategy to get high grades. The motivation is one of the powerful strategies to make students study hard, maintaining and guiding behaviors and innate strengths as reference. The previous  research have suggested that only motivation directly effects academic achievement; all other factors affect achievement only through their effect on motivation I also believed the motivation was a really important impetus for academic achievement. I wondered what makes UC Berkeley students study hard. Also, I wanted to know if having high motivation was associated with a high GPA. My hypothesis was that high motivation predicts a high GPA. I designed and developed my research based on the previous empirical studies. I conducted the interviews and the survey, and analyzed the data with R. I found that motivation is positively related to high academic achievement. 

MY ROLE

• Defined the research goal

• Designed the survey questionnaires

• Recruited participants

• Conducted interviews

• Analyzed the data with R

• Reported the findings

• Got an A+

RESEARCH Tools

• Interviews in person

• Survey by Google Survey

• Survey by Qualtrics

• Data analysis by R

DELIVERABLES

• Graph and tables

• Empirical Evidence Research Paper

Process

I interviewed 10 people before I set to plan this research project in order to define a clear goal and design survey questions. When I asked the students what made them study hard, most of the students responded that they studied hard for their bright future or they even never thought about the reason. Many students just wanted to earn a lot of money by getting a high income job and hoped to get a better social status in their future, whereas few students said that they enjoyed learning itself. Besides, some students reported that they studied hard to avoid being considered themselves as a loser comparing to other students. I also asked their GPA, and their GPAs varied regardless of their levels of academic motivation. The interesting outcome made me design the present research. I proposed that motivation had a positive effect on GPA in that students with high motivation spend more time and effort in preparing for their class and exams.

• The Null Hypothesis : There is no relationship between motivation and GPA

• The Alternative Hypothesis : There is a relationship between motivation and GPA

Method

In the present research, a sample of students from Berkeley University in California responded to a survey that measured students’ academic achievement and academic motivation. I posted a survey powered by Qualtrics on Facebook. Participants in this study were composed of undergraduate students (N = 94) from Berkeley university in California, 29 men (30.9 percent) and 65 women (69.1 percent).

Result

• Bivariate Regression Analysis:

I created a bivariate model to examine whether there was a relationship between motivation and GPA. The result of intercept was 2.597 which indicated that if students didn’t have motivation, the average GPA of them was 2.597(intercept). Whenever the level of motivation increased 1 level, 0.255 of GPA increased (b = 0.255, 95% CI = [0.069, 0.439], t(78) = 2.744, p =0.0075). I found the model was statistically significant (F(1, 78) = 7.527, p = 0.008). The R squared was 0.088, which indicated that this model explained about 8.8% of the variation in GPA. Since the p-value was smaller than the cut-off (0.05), I could reject the null hypothesis and it was statistically significant. So, I concluded that there was a positive relationship between motivation and GPA. The power was 0.7732. It means that if my alternative hypothesis is actually true in reality, I have 77.32% possibility to reject the null hypothesis.

• Multivariate Regression Analysis:

After I tested the bivariate model to identify the relationship between motivation and GPA, I noticed a possibility that units of class would be associated with GPA as well as with motivation. The units of class could be a confound variable. To test this possibility, I built a multivariate model predicting GPA from both motivation and units of class. The results of this model supported my hypothesis- the relationship between motivation and the GPA did not substantially change. The relationship between motivation and GPA had no huge difference when controlling for units of class (a unique effect), and the p-value of the slope of GPA was still significant. (b = 0.228, 95% CI = [0.041, 0.414], t(76) = 2.435, p = .017).  The both p-values of the bivariate model and the multivariate model based on the F-statistics yielded less than 0.05, so the models were statistically significant. The R squared was 0.1198, which indicated that this model explained about 11.98% of the variation in GPA. So, I concluded that GPA was not explained by units of class. There was a significant relationship between motivation and GPA and the relationship didn’t go away when I include units of class in the multivariate model.

Discussion

The present research examined a relationship between motivation and academic achievement and investigated to determine whether high motivation produces high GPA.  To test the hypothesis, undergraduate UC Berkeley students completed a survey that measured their motivation. The result showed support to the proposed hypothesis. That is, the present study showed inconsistency from the previous literature suggesting that there was no significant relationship between motivation and GPA (Cetin, B. 2015). The present study suggested that higher levels of motivation are associated with higher levels of academic achievement.

Limitation

The present study had few limitations that may have influenced on the results. First of all, the participants consisted of UC Berkeley students which may lead to sampling bias. The participants who weren’t randomly collected didn’t account for the population in the world. Also, because the GPA and motivation level were collected only from UC Berkeley students, the certain patterns of behaviors and cognitive process would affect the distribution of GPA and motivation. Third, because the survey was posted anonymously on Facebook, there was a possibility that the participants completed the survey several times and they responded without taking into consideration seriously.