Abstract:

Designing effective and efficient courses to support students to become motivated and self-directed learners cannot be easy. Faculty members should consider the diversity of students’ motivational orientations, their learning and thinking styles and academic behaviors, while designing their courses in higher education. This study investigates university students’ motivational orientations, learning styles, thinking styles, and academic behaviors for common courses in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering (SME) of general education curricula. This study has conducted with three aims;
(1) to explore university students’ motivational orientations, learning styles, thinking styles, and academic behaviors,
(2) to explore how students’ motivational orientations differ in terms of thinking styles, academic behaviors, and general SME courses,
(3) to find out how intrinsic motivation differs in terms of students’ thinking and learning styles.

The results suggest that thinking and learning styles with achievement-related behaviors are influential in intrinsic goal, extrinsic goal, task value orientations. Students in the second-year courses have higher intrinsic motivation, control of learning beliefs and self-efficacy than students in the first-year courses, but first-year students have higher test anxiety. Most engineering students who show characteristics of converging learning style and analytical thinking style have the highest motivation scores. Self-efficacy is a motivational factor differing with the combined effect of GPA and SME courses. This study suggests changing students’ motivation from extrinsic goal orientation to intrinsic goal orientation and shifting the views of students about teaching and learning process in order to take responsibility of their own learning.

Keywords:

General Education, Common Courses in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering, University students, Motivation, Academic behaviors, Learning styles, Thinking style.