A Meta-Analysis of Factors Affecting Educational Motivation

Nowadays, authorities give more attention to the creation of motivation in students in order to direct their activities and make them active. Despite the importance of this issue, contradictions are seen in the results of educational motivation researches. This study was aimed at reviewing researches conducted into factors affecting educational motivation and was carried out using meta-analysis method. The population of the present study consisted of all researches on learning motivation recorded in SID, Magiran, and Irandoc databases from 1992 to 2012. A sample of 132 researches was chosen according to the criteria for inclusion in the study, and their data was recorded on the meta-analysis worksheet prepared by the researcher. Overall effect size calculation, Number of Partial Safety (Nfs) and Q-test were used for data analysis using CMA-2 software. The results indicated that the following variables have the most effects in learning motivation respectively: learning strategies (ES=0/479), self-efficacy (ES= 0/405), self-esteem (ES= 0/384), self-regulation (ES=0/333), academic achievement (ES=0/329), test anxiety (ES= -0/196) and gender (ES= 0/037). The analysis of the homogeneity of studies showed that the combined studies were heterogeneous in all variables. The analysis of the number of partial safety indicator also suggested that there was no publication bias among integrated studies in variables.