INVESTIGATING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STUDENTS' MOTIVATION AND LEARNING ACHIEVEMENT IN A PROJECT-BASED LEARNING COURSE

Introduction:
In recent years, student-driven learning has been used for improving education in schools. Project-based learning (PBL) is often adopted to facilitate student-driven learning. PBL is an instructional method in which students learn through facilitated problem-solving tasks among teams of students. Team-based activity exercises provide students' opportunities to improve their learning, such as by understanding their own learning style and by deepening their understanding of the content being taught. It is very important for students to have positive and successful experiences when participating in project activities in PBL.
In a PBL class, the class members are divided into small teams, which work on the project together. Team grouping is an important aspect of PBL class management, since this grouping can greatly influence the success of the project. However, all projects in a class are not always successful, since there are usually some students with poor performance in terms of low motivation. Although improving the success rate of team-based activities in PBL is important, a clear method for doing this has not yet been developed.
With this in mind, our goal is to develop a system that supports team-based activities in a PBL course. As the starting point of the research, I investigated learners' motivation to PBL's educational elements, such as social activity and thinking activity, in a PBL course of software engineering, and then analyzed relationships between their motivation to the activities and learning achievement by statistical analysis. The findings of clarifying the relationships can support designing effective PBL courses.

Implementation:
To investigate relationship between learners’ motivation and learning results in PBL course, I conducted PBL classes in a Software Engineering course which consisted of 15 classes for college students from April, 2017 to July, 2017. The first classes of the course were given lectures for software engineering and the rest classes of the one were given PBL to make software design document with a team. 33 college students (including 30 Japanese students and 3 students from the other countries) took part in the course. The 30 Japanese students were chosen for the investigation to escape communication problems. At the end of the course, questionnaire survey about motivation to the PBL activities were performed. The results of the questionnaire survey, the students' performance through the course and the learning scores of the students were used to analyze relationships between the students' motivation to the PBL activities and the learning achievement.

Conclusions:
The investigation results consisted of the questionnaire results about motivation to each PBL activity and scores of PBL learning achievement. The results based on factor analysis showed as follows:
-Although the students' motivation to the PBL activities was in high level, the students who have ever experienced PBL had higher motivation to the activities than the students who have not experienced yet.
-The students were categorized into one of the two: being good at the social activity and being good at the thinking activity.
-The students, who joined the team having active discussion and have ever attended in a course of software engineering, felt the two negatives: controlling the discussion of the own team was difficult and the idea which the team chose was not satisfaction.