The relationships between students´ achievements, self-efficacy and motivation in biology education

Abstract: Students´ achievements in scientific subjects, such as biology, have stringently declined during the past decade. In order to disrupt these declining results in scientific subjects it´s important to identify factors leading to decreased academic achievements within the scientific subjects. This study aims to investigate the association between students´ achievements in biology and self-efficacy beliefs, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and amotivation among 120 Swedish students with an age between thirteen and fifteen years s. A self-efficacy sub-scale of the “Motivational for Learning Questionnaire” (MSLQ) was used to evaluate students´ self-efficacy beliefs and an “Academic Motivation Scale for Learning Biology” (AMSLB) was used to determine students´ motivation to learn biology. The results showed a significant positive correlation between students´ biology achievement and self-efficacy beliefs, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Further, a significant negative correlation was found between students´ biology achievement and amotivation. These findings indicates that both self-efficacy beliefs, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation could be important underlying factors that positively impact students´ achievements in biology.