Students' motivation toward science learning in secondary schools in Oman and Malaysia: A comparative study

Abstract

The purpose of this research wasto compare the Omani and Malaysian students' motivation toward science learning in secondary schools. Motivation is an important component from any teaching and learning process. The results of previous studies revealed that students with better motivation usually perform better in school grades. The sample size is 359 students: 37.6% of them wereMalaysian (135 students) while 62.4% wereOmani (224 students). The 30-item Science Motivation Questionnaire (SMQ) was used in this research. It was developed by Glynn, Taasoobshirazi and Brickman. The results showed that the students hada “moderate” motivation in general. Regarding the subcategories, the students had“high Extrinsically Motivation” while they hada “moderate” level of motivation in the other subcategories or motivational factors. An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the motivation towards science scores of Omani and Malaysians. This finding implied that the Omani students weremore motivated to science learning than the Malaysian students. On the other hand, the result showed that there wasa significant difference between male and female whereas the females werehighly motivated to science learning ingeneral, but both of them had the same level of self-efficacy