Factors Affecting Educational Motivation from the Viewpoint of Environmental Health Engineering Students: A Content Analysis

Students' academic motivation plays an important role in their academic achievement and is one of the most important challenges faced by the universities. The purpose of this study was to explain the factors affecting academic motivation from the perspective of environmental health engineering students. In a qualitative content analysis, in which a focused group discussion method was used for collecting data, a total of 36 Environmental Health Engineering students in six groups of students from the first to fourth year of continuous and discontinued undergraduate were interviewed. Interviews continued until saturation of the data. Like other qualitatively semi-structured interviews, the transcripts of the interviews were coded and then the codes in the form of categories were identified using more abstract headings. The accuracy of the data was confirmed by various methods. After analyzing 650 initial codes and 8 subcategories, we identified top three effective categories in the motivation to affect the education of environmental health engineering students: a) The future of career b); Professional identity; and c) Educational courses setting. It seems that the nature of engineering and health and career future, professional identity and the type of arrangement of courses have played important roles in the student's academic motivation. Probably adopting measures to identify job positions, updating the course syllabus and curriculum along with the introduction of a higher degree of environmental health and, consequently, improving the society's vision could be the basis for promoting academic motivation in the students of this field. Keywords: Educational motivation, Qualitative study, Content analysis, Environmental health, Engineering.