MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HOCHIMINH CITY ---------------- NGUYEN THU HIEN THE IMPACT OF LEARNING MOTIVATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HARDINESS ON STUDENT’S QUALITY OF LIFE AMONG ECONOMICS STUDENTS AND TECHNICAL STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY OF LAC HONG UNIVERSITY MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION THESIS HoChiMinh City – 2010 MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY ---------------- NGUYEN THU HIEN THE IMPACT OF LEARNING MOTIVATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HARDINESS ON STUDENT’S QUALITY OF LIFE AMONG ECONOMICS STUDENTS AND TECHNICAL STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY OF LAC HONG UNIVERSITY Major: Business Administration Major Code: 60.05 MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION THESIS Supervisor: DR. TRAN HA MINH QUAN HoChiMinh City – 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude and deepest appreciation to my research Supervisor, Dr. Tran Ha Minh Quan for his intensive support, valuable suggestions, guidance and encouragement during the course of my study. My sincere thanks are also due to Prof.
Nguyen Dinh Tho, for the valuable time and the precious material. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Dr. Dinh Cong Khai, Dr. Vo Xuan Vinh, Dr.
Nguyen Van Ngai, Dr. Nguyen Thi Mai Trang, members of the proposal examination committee, for their valuable comments and suggestions. I would like to thank many of my collegues and students at Lac Hong university who helped me during the collection of the data. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all of my teachers at Faculty of Business Administration and Postgraduate Faculty, University of Econimics Ho Chi Minh City for their teaching and guidance during my MBA course.
I would like to specially express my thanks to all of my classmates, my friends from for their support and encouragement. I would also like to avail this opportunity to express my appreciation to Professor Nguyen Dong Phong, UEH Board of Directors for creating MBA program in English. Finally, I heartily dedicate this study to my beloved parents and my husband, Duong who have encouraged and supported me during my study. i ABSTRACT Exploring the impact of learning motivation and psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life is important to a university.
For university, it can help them understand their student’s pyschology. It will help university build plans to stimulate their student’s learning effectiveness and improve university’s training effectively. For students, they will find the important roles of these factors to have a better learning attitude. This will help them increase their learning motivation, their psychological hardiness, their quality of life and also improve their learning effectiveness.
This research objective is to explore the factors including learning motivation and psychological hardiness impacting on student’s quality of life. Then it tries to find out whether there are the differences between these impacts among economics students and technical students at Lac Hong University. The process research will include two main steps: the pilot research and the main research, the analytic unit is student. The pilot research will be qualitative by making deeply interview with 7 students in order to check the content and meaning of words using in the measurement scales.
The main research will be quantitative with 328 students through qualitative technique of making interview directly. The reason is to test the measurement model, the research model and the hypotheses. In the context of Lac Hong university, the results show that: Firstly, learning motivation is positively related to student quality of life. Secondly, psychological hardiness is positively related to student’s quality of life.
But psychological hardiness has a higher influence on student’s quality of life than learning motivation. ii Thirdly, the impact of learning motivation on student’s quality of life in the economics student group is positive and sinificant but it’s not sinificant in the technical student group. This difference has the statistical significance in the case study of Lac Hong University. Finally, the impact of psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life is positive and sinificant in the economics student group and the technical student group.
However this different finding between two groups has not the statistical significance in the context of Lac Hong University. Keywords: student’s quality of life, learning motivation, psychological hardiness, Lac Hong university 3 CONTENTS Acknowledgement.iv List of Tables.vi List of Figures.vii CHAPTER1: INTRODUCTION.3 Research scope and research design.4 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH MODEL.1 Student’s quality of life.2 The measurement scales.1 The student quality of life measurement.2 The student learning motivation measurement.3 The student psychological hardiness measurement.3 The pilot research.4 The main research.16 CHAPTER 4: RESEARCH RESULT AND FINDING DISSCUSSION.1 Descriptive statistics of sanple.2 Characteristics of sample.2 The construct measurement scale.3 The hypotheses assessment.34 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS.2 Implications of the research.3 Limitations of the research and further research recommendation.41 Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 5 LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1: The demographical status of participants.2: The main measurement scales.1: Learning group of respondents.2: Learning brand of respondents.3: Sex of respondents.4: Age of respondents.6: Cronbach’s alpha of student’s quality of life measurement.7: Cronbach’s alpha of learning motivation measurement.8: Cronbach’s alpha of psychological hardiness measurement.9: The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) result.10: The final construct of measurement scale.11: The results of correlation analysis.12: The multi linear regression analysis on data of 328 responses.13: The multi linear regression analysis on data of group 1 (economics students).14: The multi linear regression analysis on data of group 2 (technical students).15: Conclusion about the hypotheses.32 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1: The research process.1: The results of linear regression analysis between student’s quality of life and the other factors.1 Research background Due to globalization effect, the world is now smaller, the borders between nations seem to be closer to each other. People can do business more convenient, easier to get information, or enjoy modern education from many developed countries, etc. In Viet nam, when we become an official member of World Trade Organization (WTO), it brings us many opportunities to expand relationships with other countries, exporters can expand their markets, people enjoy more variety of goods, enjoy more chances to study, etc, but it aslo brings us many challenges, for example more competitors, more knowledge needed to be updated.
Especially, for educational field, it has to deal with a very important role in training and providing the human resource that must be useful for the process of cooporation with foreign partners and ready to catch up with further global changes. In this trend, many Vietnamese universities concentrate on finding the methods to improve its quality of training. There are many researches about teaching and learning in the world. The objective is to find their own ways to improve the effectiveness of student’s learning and the quality of training.
One trend is to focus on learning motivation and student’s quality of life. Reason for this is motivation, study behaviour, student’s quality of life impacting on the training quality and the perceived result of student during the course (Cole et al. 2004; Rowold 2007, cited in Tho et al. About learning motivation, if an individual is motivated, he will try hard to complete his task and work hard to achieve goals.
In otherwise, a person who is not motivated will not try, will not work hard, or will show 1 behaviours that destroys the outcome of the situation (Eggen and Kauchak 1999). In order to overcome the pressures or unexpected problems, psychological hardiness helps people deal with their pressures in life (Maddi 1999a, cited in Tho et al. 2009) or make them become opportunities of development (Kobasa & Puccetti 1983, cited in Tho et al. About student’s quality of life, there are two trends.
The first one is focusing on the relationship between student’s quality of life and the other factors or the factors impacting on student’s quality of life. The second one is focusing on measuring the student’s quality of life (Sirgy et al. 2007, cited in Tho et al. In summary, our universities is concentrating on how to improve its training quality to catch up with the labor market demand.
In Viet nam, currently there aren’t many researches about student’s pyschology, especially student’s quality of life and other factors which have related to it such as learning motivation, psychological hardiness. Meanwhile these studies will provide universities basic information about student’s pyschology, which can be very useful for building the strategies to stimulate student’s learning effectiveness and the training effectiveness. Consequently, the related studies in this field is very neccesary. From this reason, we realizes that it is necessary to conduct such a research related to student’s psychology at Lac Hong university such as: the impact of learning motivation, psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life to provide evidence about the relationship between them, from that university can make suitable plans in order to help their students to increase their quality of life during their course or stimulate student’s learning effectiveness and its training effectiveness.
In addition, this research will try to answer whether there are differences of the 2 impact of learning motivation on student’s quality of life if compared the economics student group with the technical student group; whether there are differences of the impact of psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life if compared the economics student group with the technical student group.2 Research objective This research objective is to explore the impact of learning motivation, psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life among economics students and technical students at Lac Hong University, in particularly, this will answer the following questions: Question 1: Do learning motivation and psychological hardiness impact on student’s quality of life? Question 2: Are there differences of the impact of learning motivation and psychological hardiness on student’s quality of life if compared the economics student group with the technical student group? This research will provide some evidence about the role of learning motivation, psychological hardiness, student’s quality of life. It helps university build plans to stimulate student’s learning effectiveness and improve university’s training effectiveness. For students, they will find the important roles of these factors to have a better learning attitudes. It will help them increase their learning motivation, their psychological hardiness, their quality of life and also improve their learning effectiveness.3 Research scope and research design This research is conducted at Dong Nai province.
The research object is technical students and economics students of Lac Hong university. The process research will include two main steps: the pilot research and the main research, the analytic unit is student. 3 The pilot research will be qualitative by making deeply interview with 7 students in order to check the content and the meaning of words using in the measurement scales. The main research will be quantitative with 328 economics students and technical students through qualitative technique of making interview directly.
The reason is to test the measurement model, research model and the hypotheses. After collecting data, the measurement scales will be verified the reliability by Cronback alpha ratio, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to refine the measurement scales. Finally, the hypotheses will be tested by using the multi-linear regression analysis.4 Research structure The structure of this research will include 5 chapters. Chapter 1: Introduction will introduce about research background, research objective and research meaning, research scope and research design, research structure.
Chapter 2: Literature review will provide a literature reiview of student’s quality of life, learning motivation, psychological hardiness. Chapter 3: Methodology will present methodology that used in the research, this includes research methodology design, research procedures, measurement scales. Chapter 4: Research results will describe sampling, processing data, presents analyzing the data collected, and finding disscussion. Chapter 5: Conclusion and implication present conclusions and implications from the research project.
4 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH MODEL This chapter is to focus on introducing the literature review in order to establish research model. This chapter will include two parts. The first one will introduce the literature review of student’s quality of life and learning motivation, psychological hardiness.