Effects of Motivation on STEM Students

Overview

Objectives/Goals Every year there are 1.2 million high school dropouts in the United States. The most effective way to reduce this alarming data is to find the most effective form of motivation that keeps students in school. The purpose of our project was to determine the effects of different types of motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic) on STEM students. The extrinsic form of motivation in our project was a group prize and the intrinsic motivation was donation to charity. Methods/Materials A variety of classes, rewards, and STEM related tests were used for this project. Students were tested over multiple days and were given different forms of motivation after the first day of the control (no motivation). Results After all the data was collected and analyzed, we found that in the control group, Class 2 saw the worst improvement in attempted (37%) and correct (82%) scores, where class 4 saw the second to lowest improvement in attempted (40%) and correct (54%) scores. For the group prize, Class 3 saw second to lowest improvement in attempted (54%) and correct (109%) scores, where class 6 saw the lowest improvement in attempted (24%) and correct (46%) scores. For the charity prize, Class 1 saw the highest improvement in attempted (64%) and correct (154%) scores, where Class 5 also saw the highest improvement in attempted (71%) and correct (87%) scores. Conclusions/Discussion Conclusions that can be gathered from this experiment is that motivation in intrinsic means is the most effective form of motivation. Additionally, students who traditionally are not highly motivated are greatly motivated by donating to charity as shown by the greatest improvement from the College Preparatory students. These results prove that charitable motivation is the most effective form of motivaiton among students. The impact of this project decreases high school dropout rates tremendously.

Competition history

• CSEF 2017 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry S0411

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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