Family Impact on Students’ Motivation.doc

Family Impact on Students’ Motivation Published in the Second International Conference On Administrative Sciences Proceedings Organized by CIM KFUPM, April 2004 ABSTRACT: This study tries to identify the impact of some family important variable on students’ motivation and their GPA in King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. Several studies had stressed the importance of studying students’ motivation as an approach to improve their academic performance and enhance the corporation image. The family and society changing values and cultures have a great impact on the students’ motivation and their academic integration and performance. This study based on a survey method for collecting data. A questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 727 KFUPM students representing the three largest colleges in the university. The questionnaire was consisted of several items. The items are related to some students and family demographic characteristics in addition to items about students GPA and their desire to study. The original questionnaire was translated to Arabic and from Arabic back to English by a professional translator in the university and reviewed by the researcher. Results showed that students tend to attribute their academic success to internal factors such as hard working while they attribute their failure to external factors such as family problems. INTRODUCTION: Motivation is an important subject in management, organizational behavior and psychology in general. Motivation was defined by Greenberg and Baron (2003) as: “The set of processes that arouse, direct, and maintain human behavior toward attaining some goal.” (P. 190). The same researchers maintained that motivation was a multifaceted subject. This implies that people may have several different motives operating at once (Greenberg Brown, 2003). Operationally, motivation refers in this study, to students desire to study and achieve high grades as measured by their Cumulative Grade Point Average