Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

School motivation leads and supports students’ efforts and activities provide cognitive resources to learn. However, this is a very broad concept and some authors distinguish three relevant constructs for motivation in educational contexts, including academic self-efficacy, achievement motivation, and causal attribution to the achievement. This study determines the level of motivation toward school tasks for a group of students in fifth and sixth of primary education, in order to establish whether there is any relation between motivation and the extracurricular activities they attend. For that, an interpretive, descriptive, and inferential cross-sectional study was carried out using a non-probabilistic sample of voluntary subjects. It is designed as an ad hoc questionnaire and it is administered bythe School Motivation Scale (EME) with a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .753. The results indicate that the motivation of students toward school tasks is high with respect to the total motivation as well as in each of the three dimensions that the EME tries to analyze. In addition, the amount of extracurricular activities that each child attends varies between a minimum of zero and a maximum of seven, and students attending these activities do, mostly, between three and six hours per week (44%). Academic and sports activities have the highest percentage of participation (26.8%), whereas academic activities have the lowest percentage (6.4%). It was found a significant correlation between the amount of extracurricular activities and self-efficacy (p=.010). There have been also found significant differences between the types of extracurricular activities (academic, sports, and arts) and self-efficacy (p=.001) were also found. Finally, the results are discussed and compared with other previous studies, demonstrating the consistency of our findings.