Medical students’ motivation and academic performance: the mediating roles of self-efficacy and learning engagement

Abstract

Background: Motivation matters in medical students' academic performance. However, few studies have specifically examined how motivation and external environmental factors (e.g., institutions) affect medical students' performance with large-scale data sets. The roles of selfefficacy and learning engagement in the mechanisms that govern how motivation affects academic performance are still unclear. Objective: This study aims to advance a comprehensive understanding about the relationships between medical students' motivation, self-efficacy, learning engagement, and academic performance in a nationwide survey, taking students' demographic factors and sociocultural environments into consideration. Design: We collected data from 1930 medical students in China. We probed the relations between studying variables. We then performed structural equation model (SEM) analysis to examine the mediating roles of self-efficacy and learning engagement on the relationship between motivation and academic performance. We further carried out multiple-group SEM analyses to compare differences between males and females, and between students in key universities and colleges (KUCs) and non-key universities and colleges (NKUCs). Results: Medical students in KUCs demonstrated significantly higher intrinsic motivation, better academic performance and lower extrinsic motivation than those in NKUCs. Male students reported higher intrinsic motivation but surprisingly lower academic performance than females. The total effect of intrinsic motivation on academic performance was larger than that of extrinsic motivation. There were significant indirect effects of either intrinsic or extrinsic motivation on academic performance through learning engagement. Besides, both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation predicted self-efficacy; however, the direct effect of self-efficacy on academic performance was not significant. Conclusions: This study provided researchers with a holistic picture of students' types of motivation in relation to academic performance. Findings from this study can help in rethinking the role of self-efficacy in medicine, in finding more effective interventions for promoting medical students' levels of motivation, and in developing motivation-related counselling methods for different groups of medical students.

Association between Life Skills and Academic Performance in Adolescents in the Autonomous Community of Aragon (Spain)

“…Secondly, we observed a significant association between the level of self-efficacy and academic performance. Our findings are in agreement with previous studies [8,26,45,46] that suggest that the higher the level of self-efficacy, the better the academic performance. According to Schunk [47], those students who have a higher level of self-efficacy also tend to be more motivated, have higher aspirations, and to be more prepared to work hard to fulfil them [38].…”

“…Social skills are defined as the specific social abilities that are necessary to interact with, and relate to, others in an efficient, respectful, and mutually satisfactory manner [4]. Cognitive skills are the foundation for the construction and organization of knowledge and reasoning [5] and include abilities such as self-efficacy, defined as the belief in one's ability to face diverse situations [6][7][8]. Affective skills influence subjective wellness; subjective wellness could be colloquially described as happiness and comprises two components, namely cognitive and emotional.…”

“…However, the level of empathy and assertiveness ranges from good in some studies [18], to moderate-high [3,21] and moderate-low [22] in others. Similarly, a positive association exists between academic performance and self-efficacy [8,[23][24][25][26]. The relationship between academic performance and affective balance, meanwhile, is unclear in the literature.…”

The Relationship Between Family Support and e-Learning Engagement in College Students: The Mediating Role of e-Learning Normative Consciousness and Behaviors and Self-Efficacy

“…In accordance with social cognitive theory ( Bandura, 1997 ) and self-efficacy theory ( Jiang et al, 2019 ; Codella et al, 2020 ; Li et al, 2020 ), we confirmed a mediating role of self-efficacy in the association between family support and student e-learning engagement, which means that promoting family support as a way to improve students’ sense of self-efficacy could help students put more energy into e-learning. As an important variable, self-efficacy can influence motivation and learning in student activities and play a decisive role in learner behavior by affecting various personal dimensions, such as focus, dedication, vigor, aspirations, and expectations ( Codella et al, 2020 ; Wu et al, 2020 ). Therefore, the higher the learning self-efficacy of students, the more they will be involved in learning.…”

Does the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank score (ATAR) predict academic performance in a podiatry course?

“…It was deemed likely that the performance of students who withdrew from the podiatry program was strongly influenced by variables such as motivation and subject interest. For this reason, these students were excluded from the study (Molnar et al, 2012;Wu et al, 2020). It would be worthwhile investigating the multifactorial nature of student retention to evaluate whether lower scoring ATAR students are more likely to fail subjects or withdraw from the course so support strategies could be targeted towards these students.…”