I am an Applied Psychology due to graduate in 2024. Throughout my journey in this degree I have grown interest into fields of counselling psychology, psychotherapy, developmental psychology, and philosophy. Once I graduate, I plan to take a year out to expand my knowledge and experience through working with children and teens, as well as spending the summer in America working in a summer for kids with serious illness. This will then be followed by a masters in counselling and psychotherapy to further explore the field and work towards a career as a psychotherapist.
Personality and academic motivation are widely studied topics. These topics have been researched together and seperately in a wide variety of cultures. However, there has not been much research conducted in Ireland. As well as this, research conducted tends to focus on academic motivation being combined into one score. Therefore, this research primarily focused on expanding this research to an Irish population by using a quantitative survey design distributed to Irish undegraduate students to gain empirical evidence. This research also delved into the impact of this research amoung undergraduate students, lecturers, and college services.
The aim of this research was to expand previous research and investigate the role personality triats play in academic motivation. This was done by focusing on two traits of the Big Five personality traits, extraversion and neuroticism, as well as splitting academic motivation into intrinsic and extrinsic academic motivation. This was to get a more focused view on ow personality traits can affect intrinsic and extrinsic academic motivation independently of one another. The research question under investigation was: Can students’ extraversion and neuroticism scores predict academic motivation?
The research should that hypothesis 1 was statistically significant while hypothesis 2 was not. Both of these hypotheses had partially alligned with the previous research in this field. It was found that Extraversion was the dominant predictor for both intrinsic and extrinsic academic motivation, with a weak positive correlation. It was also found that neuroticism had a weak negative correlation with extrinsic motiation but a weak positive correlation with intrinsic motivation, which according to researchers could be due to certain aspects of neuroticism being beneificial towards academic motivation. These findings add further depth to research in personality and motivation by utilising a more focused approach and introducing an irsh sample. This research could be used as a framework for training in educational settings, as well as training for guidance and college counsellors to helps students in dealing with issues of motivation.
The role of extraversion and neuroticism on academic motivation