The influence of personality traits on the formation of students’ academic motivation

Abstract

Major changes in the education system transform the activities of all the parties involved in the educational process. The introduction of a credit-modular system prompts higher educational institutions to align the learning process with new requirements and opportunities. Teachers face new goals and objectives requiring a proper level of competence in didactics and an ability to organize independent student work, which forms an integral part of the credit-modular system. Independence is considered as both a primary and a secondary quality of personality, acquired through studies by solving various learning tasks. Students are independent when they can regulate their learning. The higher education system builds a learning environment aimed at fostering student autonomy. The use of various cognitive styles in training students of different specializations determines the individual characteristics of solving various problems and develops specific qualities inherent in their specialization. Student motivation is of great importance in this process. Motivation directly affects one’s interest in learning. Students with passion for their learning tasks show high academic performance and are more immune to learning difficulties. Learning motivation has been dwindling recently. For many years, educational motivation has been not only one of the most relevant and popular research topics, but also one of the most controversial ones. Attempts to apply research findings in real life have not yielded tangible results so far. Our work investigates the problem of building academic motivation and describes various theories explaining the emergence of motivation: social cognitive theory of A. Bandura, self-determination theory of R. Ryan and E. Deci, self-actualization theory of C. Rogers, and expectancy-value theory of J. Atkinson. Students’ personal characteristics and their impact on the development of learning motives are described. The participants in this study were students from higher education institutions in Uzbekistan—735 individuals. To assess academic motivation, T. O. Gordeeva's Academic Motivation Scale was used. To evaluate personal qualities, A. Duckworth's GRIT perseverance diagnostic method was applied. The statistical processing of the research data was carried out using the "Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 23.0)" program. The results of the study showed that the level of perseverance as a personality trait can be considered a factor determining the strength of academic motivation: students with a high level of perseverance exhibit pronounced intrinsic motivation; at a low level of perseverance, students are unable to overcome difficulties arising in learning, and they demonstrate more pronounced extrinsic motivation.