The relationship between academic motivation and self-regulation strategies with students’ statistics anxiety

Abstract

The purpose of present study was to determine the relationship between educational motivation and self-regulation strategies with statistical course anxiety of students. The research method of this study was correlation- descriptive design. The study population consisted all students at the faculty of Education & Psychology and Economics’ University of Sistan and Baluchestan in the first semester 2014 were chosen Statistics course, that 180 of them, according to Morgan table by Stratified random sampling based on gender were selected. Three questionnaires of Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (Kervis et al, 1985), Academic Motivation Scale (Vallerend, et al 1992) and Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich et al, 1990) were used to collect the information. To analyze the data, Pearson correlation coefficient, stepwise regression, independent t and one-sample t test was applied. The results revealed that there was a significant and reverse relationship between intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, cognition strategy and Meta cognition with statistics anxiety, and there was a significant and direct relationship between Amotivation with statistics anxiety of students. Also, the results of the stepwise regression illustrated that Metacognition, Amotivation and intrinsic motivation could predict the statistics anxiety of students. In addition, results showed that there are significant differences between statistics anxiety of students’ base on educational grade and bachelor students had more statistics anxiety. All in all it seems, increasing intrinsic and extrinsic motivating and as well as self-regulation skills training for students can be effective in reducing statistics anxiety.

Keywords

• "intrinsic motivation"
• " extrinsic motivation"
• cognitive strategies
• meta cognitive strategies
• statistic course anxiety