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The Impact of Motivation on Community College Students’ Academic Success

Background

Finding the sources of motivation in the students of today is a variable that is forever changing. Some students have a great support system at home or heavily rely on the resources their schools have to offer. Some rely purely on themselves perhaps because they pay for school school themselves or because they would be the first to get a degree and might want to provide for family. Whatever the case may be, it seems motivation is a case by case occurrence and depends on more than one source of motivation. One can agree that, “as college students, it can be hard to prioritize their own health, especially when they are pushed to prioritize academics, work, and extracurriculars.” (Borden) The sources of motivation for these students are diverse and the reasons behind this are directly correlated to their current reality. This can make it increasingly difficult for students to focus or reach out for aid. As a result, it seems like mentors and counselors are frustrated and are competing for students’ time and attention. (McKay and Crone) The students and millennials of today seem to also be juggling with jobs, children and personal lives and health in the race to better themselves and their education. During these fast and changing times, students all around are on their journey to evolve along with their environment. Does their GPA reveal their struggles and the complexity of their lives and how much support they receive from outside factors?

Hypotheses

Entering the realm of motivation and grade point average is a tricky thing to do. How does one measure motivation anyway? And what does GPA really reflect? Using some safe generalizations can help give this research momentum. One can expect that the more a student engages with mentors readily available at colleges, the better the student will do in their classes. One can also assume that having consistent interactions with the people closest to you in your life such as parents and peers, can better your chances in academic success through the motivation they can give. This can lead one to believe that self motivation could be a last result if you have these kinds of outside influences and support around you. A last piece of hypothesis could be that the more financial support the student has, the higher their security, thus, they will have the motivation to do well in class.

Primary Research Method

The primary research was collected by a series of questions that aimed to uncover how students acquire their motivation. The questions including one multiple choice question that serves (later on in the study) to analyze if students have multiple sources of motivation or are limited to one or few. The questions focused on the communication between child and parent, siblings, friends and high school and college mentors. These questions were developed to evaluate where the students main sources of motivation came from. The purpose of these questions were to determine whether a connection and communication with adults (parents and mentors) proved to be more essential in students’ life then other sources of motivation (communication with siblings and friends). There is an importance in “respecting the power of relationships is critical to student motivation.” (Mckay and Crone)

Participants and Procedure The surveys in this study were handed out to mostly people of color. 64% of Bunker Hill Community College’s student population are people of color. The rest are white, of unknown race or multiple races. It was able to be observed that only a small portion of caucasian students were accounted for but it was also observed that caucasian students only represents a smaller percentage of students compared to those of color. All 50 surveys were handed out in the span of a week, so the result are fair and accurate. The study took place at a variation of times. At times in the morning, early afternoon and during the evening. No surveys were dismissed or forced and so, the study was received in good nature. The collection of surveys were organized into google spreadsheet and analyzed carefully.

Data Analysis

After assessing the data collected through the survey responses, it was apparent that the findings aligned, for the most part, with the hypotheses. In the case of focusing on mentor motivation, the hypothesis, surprisingly, did not match with the results. Mentor motivation, the outermost type of motivation that exists beyond the family unit, was found to be the least of a priority to students in the sample. This is true across the board. Initially, one would think that the more students built a relationship with faculty, as well as experts and allies in supporting the students’ academic success, the students would feel more motivated to excel academically and receive a higher GPA. However, this is not the case across all tiers. A higher percentage of students do not consult with mentors provided at Bunker Hill Community College. All except students in the middle tier who have a GPA of 2.6-3.0, provides evidence that the number of those who do not see a mentor outweighs the number of those who see a mentor regardless of frequence. This can only mean that more students are relying on other kinds of motivation to survive their semesters as a community college student.

Mentors can take many forms in a community college setting, such as Bunker Hill Community College. Students work alongside tutors, administrative staff, teachers, and other kinds student support staff. Each person they interact with has an opportunity to act as a mentor, however, every person’s life experience is unique. While counselors are needed to support students in taking the next step academically, their process has been critiqued, where each division of the school shares specialized information either from the perspective of what it means to be successful. If a student does not know how to navigate the “information dump” they will have trouble making decisions for themselves. However, when career and guidance counselors use a holistic approach to sharing and retrieving information from the student and encouraging an independent spirit, the students are much more successful. (Grubb) Therefore, it is not that mentors are less valuable to a student’s educational success. But the other forms of motivation (parental, peer and self) are more contingent on the student’s success. Great mentors, however, may pull upon their students’ experiences and deeply understand these three forms of motivation in order to strengthen their ability to do well.

Figure 1

The next kind of motivation is parental motivation. The study somewhat proved the hypothesis that communication with parents was correlated with their motivation. Initially, this study was prompted to prove that those who consulted with their parents would overall do better in their studies. Although the students who never spoke to their parents had the lowest GPA, still, similar numbers of students across all tiers of GPA had some sort of communication with their parents. At first it was hard to believe that college students were more prompted to talk to their parents about school than to their academic advisors. Figure 1 shows that the number of students talked to their parents often about school, were small. Figure 1 also shows that students in the middle tiers outnumber the students on the highest GPA tier several times in terms of frequency. You can see this when you see how the percentage of students who never talked to their parents (in red) decreased as we move down the row of pie charts. So far, this is showing that a students’ source of motivation is residing more intrinsically than extrinsically. While partnering with students’ families, particularly the notoriously labeled “helicopter parents,” may invite a loss of student autonomy, we have found that strategic, carefully crafted invitations that enlist limited parental support serve us well. (McKay and Crone) This occurrence was briefly considered before analyzing parental support data and could partially be the reason for these results.

Figure 2

The parents’ financial support was another factor in understanding how parental motivation may impact a student’s overall academic success and participation in higher education. Could it be true that the higher the parental contribution, the more motivated the student? Surprisingly, this is also not the case. The data shows that as the GPA increases the percentage of parents who reward their child with financial support decreases. According to these results, students with the highest GPAs were not depending on their parents’ but took it more upon themselves to pay for their education. This could mean that the more self-financed your education is, the harder you work and focus on getting good grades. So far, this is proving that the closer we get to the student, the closer we are to finding what is motivating them.

Figure 3

Moving along to peer motivation, the results showed, at one angle, that the more interactions the student had with fellow peers, the more supported the student, thus, the better the student did in college. Looking at the results at face value, the option of “often” was only used when the GPA was at 3.1 or higher. The data shows that students who never speak to their peers steadily decreases as the GPA increases. Looking closer at Figure 4 at those in the middle tier, those students speak to their peers less frequently or never but still seem to keep their GPA higher than 2.5. The correlation between talking to your peers about academic progress and motivation is less apparent. The main point here is that the collected data revealed the only group who talked to their peers often about their progress, were the highest performing group.

Figure 4

The survey question that was the most straightforward was the question where students evaluated their own self-motivation. If the pattern continues, the higher self-motivation, the higher the GPA. This serves true if one focuses on the numbers for those who had low motivation. It decreases as the GPA increases and by the time we get to those on the highest tier, those with low motivation disappear. Those on the highest tier, have the highest recorded sense of self-motivation. Way more students have a pretty good sense of self-motivation! This proves that students are relying on themselves more for motivation and on sources much closer to them such as peers and less on outer sources of motivation such as mentors.

Figure 5

Taking a closer look into what students are doing to keep themselves motivated, analysis on what students answered for “What motivates you?” Seeing as this is the only question on the survey that lets you pick more than one answer, it was the perfect way to understand if the students’ motivation was single focused (example: making money) or if it was multifaceted and complicated than a single focus. After deciding to isolate “make good money”, the results showed that what was motivating students was much more than just money. The reasons students are more self-motivated are much more emotional and complex. Students were aiming to be the first in their family to earn a degree, they were thinking about their children and about getting higher paying jobs. It seems like the higher the GPA, the more motivating factors exists that contribute to their self-motivation.

Limitations

There were some limitations that may have affected the quality of the study. The first limitation seemed to involve the convenience of the sampling locations. Most of the surveys were filled out at and by students working at the library. The library gave the convenience of a large group of students working on schoolwork. A small portion of the surveys were handed out at a more open space where students typically socialize. There were other places they surveys could have been handed out including the cafeteria, halls outside of classes, lobbies and others. More variety in the location of the samplings could have given a wider variation in the data. A small limitation that was unprecedented was that some students skipped a question or two. Therefore the data is only almost entirely accurate.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it seemed that if students had more of a relationship with provided mentor/counselors, students would feel more supported during the school year. The data results revolving around parental relationships/ communications seemed to not correlate with the students motivation. Effective parental guidance can perhaps be more strategic to increase a positive response from the child. The hypothesis of involving motivation coming from the parent could prove to be correct if a better approach of the child was implemented. Across the board, students were more impacted by a school support. It also seemed to be that self-motivation was directly correlated with the students’ GPA. Perhaps, mentors and staff in colleges should from stronger relationships with their students. By focusing on the relationships and experiences that exist in their lives of the student, one can gain the trust of the student and give them the motivation they need to do well in their studies.

Works Cited

Borden, Ryan. UC Davis: Student Health and Counseling Services. “ Self-Care for the Busy College Student”

https://shcs.ucdavis.edu/blog/self-care-busy-college-student

Grubb, W. Norton, Community College Research Center. 'Getting Into the World': Guidance and Counseling in Community Colleges

https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/getting-into-the-world.html

McKay, Kathy and Crone, Ian. Association of American Colleges & Universities. “ Motivating Today's College Students ”

https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/motivating-todays-college-students