Abstract:

Motivation is present in the different phases of people's cognitive processing, in stages such as: coding, storage, memory and the formation of judgments. For this reason, knowing the motivational status of students allows us to understand how they will act in the different situations and academic challenges that arise throughout the course. People may be motivated because they value an activity or because there is strong external coercion, the difference between the two motivations being a possible turning point between the academic success or failure of university students.

Several researchers have studied the motivational state of students in different educational contexts, differentiating between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The first type refers to the ability of people to participate in an activity for the enjoyment and satisfaction that is obtained from that participation, that is, when students understand learning as an end in itself. For its part, extrinsic motivation is obtained when an action is carried out with the aim of obtaining a future reward, in this case, students would understand education from its most utilitarian version and learning to achieve their expectations.

For this reason, this work tries to better understand what is the motivation of the Higher Technical School of Edification students, with the intention of delving into the decisions that have led them to study a university degree and learn about the state of motivation with which they position themselves to take the different subjects. To measure the students' degree of motivation, a Likert Scale (Academic Motivation Scale) has been used, which has been disseminated through a web questionnaire among building students. The questionnaire consists of 28 items that seek to answer the question why are you going to university? In such a way that this research raises an attractive methodology that can be replicated by other university teachers who wish to know more in depth the reasons that lead their students to sit in the classroom every day. The research was carried out between the months of October and November 2021 with the return to presence in Spanish university classrooms, after having spent almost a year and a half of online teaching within the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

Keywords:

Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, building engineering, Likert scale.