Effective Participation and Motivation: An Investigation on Secondary School Students

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the secondary school students’ level of effective participation and their motivation. This study employs a survey consisting of 251 secondary school students from the schools located in Igdir and Erzurum, in East of Turkey. The data of the study were gathered through "Effective Participation Scale" and "Intrinsic-Extrinsic Motivation Scale". The analysis of the obtained data showed that female secondary school students are academically more engaged than the male students and male secondary school students are more disaffected than the female students. It has been found that students engage in English and Turkish lessons more than Mathematics and they are disaffected with Mathematics at most. It has been determined that academically engaged students’ intrinsic motivations increase in the positive direction while that of the disaffected students’ decrease as the class levels increase.