ON MOTIVATION OF STUDENTS TO STUDY AT AN AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY: FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE MOTIVATION OF EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES

Abstract

Students' motivation is studied quite regularly, but most often it occurs from psychological and pedagogical positions [1; 6; 7; 9]. However, students do not just go to university, they work to acquire the knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary for the development of their future profession, so the learning process must be viewed through the prism of work motivation. The peculiarity of this research is the reliance on research methods that allow us to study this aspect of students’ activity, in particular, the V.I. Gerchikov’s method with some changes that are inevitable due to the specifics of an educational process. The purpose of the study is to determine the factors that affect the motivation of educational activities. The theoretical part of the study describes the main approaches to motivating students' learning activities, as well as the specifics of relationships in the process of studying at the university, which does not allow direct use of methods and practices that have appeared in the framework of theories of labor motivation. As a result of the research conducted in 2019 on the main massif of the 1st and 4th years of full-time education in the Izhevsk State Agricultural Academy by questionnaire (n=781), significant differences in the motivation of students of different groups and faculties were revealed, which allowed us to assume that there are problems in the educational process, which we have not previously recorded. To determine the causes of significant differences in the motivation of individual groups, focus group studies were conducted (n=92) in 6 study groups, where 2 with low average motivation, 2 with middle average motivation, 2 with high average motivation. The authors analyzed the reasons for failure and non-attendance of classes, the organization of the educational process, the specifics of relationships in groups, the impact of the division into subcultures on the learning process and relationships in a group, leisure-time of students, their ideas about the desired changes in the educational process.