The effect of perceived campus learning environment on students' self-determined motivation in vocational studies

The purpose of this study is to investigate the unidirectional relationship between the campus learning environment as perceived by students, the satisfaction of basic psychological needs, and self-determined motivation, using Deci and Ryan's self-determined theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; 2002) and Vallerand's (1997) integrated motivational sequence. In addition, the impact of four campus environmental factors on students' satisfaction of basic psychological needs and their subsequent self-determined motivation is examined; these are teacher involvement, teacher support, students' collaborativeness, and supportive campus environment. This study also reveals the importance of the outside-classroom environment, which has not been investigated in detail in previous self-determined theory studies.;Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to find that Vallerand's (1997) integrative motivational sequence could be applied in Hong Kong vocation educational context to describe the relationships among campus learning environment as perceived by students, the satisfaction of basic psychological needs and self-determined motivation. Among the tested models, the fully mediated model best described the unidirectional relationships between the latent constructs: Supportive campus environment, students' collabortiveness, and teacher involvement had positive and significant links with students' self-determined motivation (both in terms of self-determined index or intrinsic motivation) through the mediation of basic needs satisfaction. Teacher support also exerted a positive but insignificant effect on self-determined motivation via the satisfaction of basic needs. In addition, the supportive campus environment was found to have the highest direct link with students' satisfaction of basic needs and indirect links with SDI and IM, with students' collaborativeness and teacher involvement ranked the second and third respectively. Teacher support had positive but insignificant impact. Year-3 students shared the same rank order about the relative importance of the four campus learning environment factors but Year-1 students did not perceive any significant difference among the four factors. It is possible that these findings were due to the characteristics of IVE students (e.g. developmental stage and their past academic experience), as well as the IVE course arrangements.;The present study is important because it provided empirical evidence to examine IVE students' motivation orientations through a person-in-context perspective and to explore the possibility of a more proactive approach in solving possible motivational problems through the manipulation of campus social contexts. The findings also suggested that more emphasis should be put on supportive campus environment and students' collaborativeness, areas which have often been neglected in previous SDT studies. However, the present study did only find partial support to the expected simplex structure of correlations among the seven motivation orientations in the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS). This highlights the need to re-examine whether the question items could reflect the corresponding motivation orientation and to review the concept of the self-determined continuum.;The target population for this study was all full-time higher diploma students in the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (IVE). A total of 847 IVE students from eight IVE campuses participated in the study. The participant profile was 564 male and 245 female (38 students did not report gender), 411 in Year-1 studies and 436 in Year-3 studies, as well as 391 in business courses and 456 in engineering courses. Year-1 students got significantly higher mean score in the self-determined index (SDI) than Year-3 students, and business students were higher than engineering students in SDI. Besides, the mean score of SDI for the whole sample was 1.42 (SD = 3.64), ranging from a maximum score of 10.3 to a minimum score of -12.06, with a media of 1.57. The relatively low mean and the limited range of scores might suggest that IVE students' SDI score was lower than other populations examined by the AMS (e.g. Chen & Carey, 2009; Fairchild et al, 2005; Vallerand et al., 1992; Vallerand et al., 1997). This highlights the need to discover which campus environmental factors has the greatest linkage with IVE students' satisfaction of basic needs and their self-determined motivation and how this happens, as a way to tackle the possible problem of low motivation.