Md. Nurul Islam and Nigar Soltana
University of Chittagong, Chittagong
Educational psychologists, over the world, are more concerned to measure the academic motivation of high school students. They considered academic motivation as primary indicators of students’ learning process as well as their academic achievement. The present study was aimed to find out the demographic factor correlates with academic motivation of high school students in Bangladesh. In this regard, 294 high school students in tenth grade from six high schools were selected through multi-stage random sampling method. A Bangla version of “Academic Motivation Questionnaire” (Fatematuzzohra et al., 2010), originally developed by Vallerand et al. (1989), was used to measure student’s academic motivation. Academic motivation was varied significantly with reference to ‘location of the school’ (t=6.865, p<.01), ‘father’s occupation’ (F=3.667, p<.05), and ‘monthly household income’(F=5.993, p<.05). Regression model explained approximately 16% variance (R2=.162, F (7, 286) =7.916, p<.01) of academic motivation, in which ‘location of school’ independently explained 13.6% variance. Implications for understanding the socio-demographic factors relating student’s academic motivation are discussed.