Jinhua Mathias and Julie Wilson Teaching Fellows at the Foundation - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Motivation, Resilience and Self-efficacy and their Contribution to Chinese International Foundation Students’ Academic Adjustment

Teaching Fellows at the Foundation Centre, Durham University

Jinhua Mathias and Julie Wilson

Introduction and outline

 Background of the study  Method: questionnaire  Results and discussion  Limitation  Summary  Implications of the study

A study of Chinese international foundation students’ academic adjustment.

Background of the study

The Background

Number of Chinese students in UK nearly 90000 in 2014 Wide range of degrees Biggest challenge? Contributing factors to success

Background of the study

Motivation, motivation, motivation

 Level of motivation – self motivated to being motivated by

• thers

 Types of motivation – intrinsic to extrinsic  Chinese students’ motivation to study abroad has two primary sources:

• the motivation to have an education abroad as
• pposed to home ( Pull and push factor),
• personal motivation to study a subject (intrinsic or

extrinsic).

Background of the study

Resilience

 Resilience: resourcefulness, self-confidence, self- discipline, sensibleness, adaptability, and flexibility (Giordano, 1997)  Seven personal resilience characteristics (Wang, 2009): positive world view (PWV), positive self-concept (PSC), focused sense of purpose (FSP), flexible thinking (FT), social flexibility (SF), organising ambiguity (OA) and proactivity (Pro)

Background of the study

General self-efficacy

 Self-efficacy: an individual’s confidence or belief in one’s ability to effectively engage in behaviours toward one’s desired goal (Bandura, 1997)  Study showed that academic self-efficacy and optimism were strongly related to performance and adjustment.

Background of the study

It is also important to know,

3,400 miles 3,200 miles

• 39.4 times the size of

UK

• 55 ethnic minorities
• 7 main linguistic

groups

• Nearly 300 local

dialects

• Educational differences
• eg.“GaoKao”

“I was more shocked by south-north difference (within China) than east-west difference (China/UK).” (Zhao, S.)

The Aim

Aim of the study

 Foundation students’ motivation  Contribution to the academic adjustment of Chinese international students.

Method

 Sample (57 students from academic year of 2012-2015)  Data collection instrument: creating the questionnaire  Motivation --“The university student Motivation and Satisfaction Questionnaire version 2”, by Neill (2004).  Personal Resilience -- based on ODR’s Personal Resilience framework, as cited in Wang (2009).  General Self-Efficacy (GSE) (Luszczynska, Gutiérrez‐Doña & Schwarzer, 2005)  Adjustment -- relating to adjustment to teaching and learning, assessment and time management, communication and group work , etc.

Method

 Data collection instrument: questionnaire

• To ensure reliability, we repeated questions in different ways
• All translated into Chinese and tested on former Chinese

Foundation students

• Received many helpful suggestions
• Final version of questionnaire distributed twice in the academic

year

Results and discussion

Motivation

• No. of students (out of 57)

Self exploration (SE) 26 Altruism (AT) 22 Instrumental attraction (IN-AT) 29 Instrumental avoidance (IN-AV) 5 Hedonism (HE) 21 Self image attraction (SI-AT) 12 Self image avoidance (SI-AV) 8

Students’ primary sources of motivations (2012-15)

Results and discussions

Type variables Pearson Correlation for Academic adjustment End of term

• Begin. of term

Motivation Intrinsic Self–exploration (SE) 0.418** 0.371** Altruism (AT) 0.387** 0.241 Extrinsic Instrumental value attraction (IN-AT) 0.026

• 0.059

Instrumental value avoidance (IN-AV) -0.029

• 0.129

Hedonism (HE) 0.112

• 0.167

Self-image attraction (SI-AT) 0.126 0.079 Self-image avoidance (SI-AV)

• 0.089
• 0.062

Correlation of motivation with academic adjustment (2012-15)

Results and discussions

Correlations of resilience and self-efficacy with academic adjustment (2012-15)

Variables Pearson Correlation for Academic adjustment End of term Beginning of term Resilience Positive World View (PWV)

0.457* 0.067

Positive Self-Concept (PSC)

0.502** 0.162

Focused Sense of Purpose (FSP)

0.448* 0.403**

Flexible Thinking (FT)

0.515** 0.223*

Social Flexibility (SF)

0.413** 0.269

Organising Ambiguity (OA)

0.587** 0.414**

Proactive (Pro)

0.682** 0.442**

General Self Efficacy General Self-efficacy (GSE)

0.508** 0.297**

Results and discussions

Motivation (intrinsic) Self-efficacy Resilient R=0.264 Pearson product for partial correlations (** indicating p<0.01)

Results and discussions

Personal resilience Motivation (intrinsic) Self-efficacy

Academic Adjustment

Limitations of the study

Number of students Background of students Lack of qualitative data

Summary of findings

 Combination of motivating factors  However, findings indicate that

• nly intrinsic motivation

contributes to academic success  All have a positive effect on academic adjustment  It seems that they are not internally correlated

Implications of the study

Asking the right questions could improve success rates. For Recruiters Could be useful additional indicators for good academic adjustment For Student Support Could identify potential problems in Induction Week Appropriate support (such as peer mentoring) could be utilised