Beyond superficiality: The relationship between motivation : Learning in electronic engineering students

Research indicates that a deep approach to learning is highly and positively related with students' development of expertise and transfer abilities, making the fostering of such deep learning approaches extremely relevant within higher education. Motivation plays a key role in fostering these learner experiences because it influences the activities that a learner chooses to engage in, as well as the level of engagement in such activities (i.e, deep approach to learning). This cross-sectional survey research employed Spanish versions of the MUSIC® Model of Academic Motivation Inventory (Jones, 2016), and a subset of the math and science engagement development scales (Wang, Fredricks, Ye, Hofkens, & Linn, 2016) to better understand which motivational factors correlate to deep learning in the context of an undergraduate electronic engineering program in Colombia. The relationships were determined by correlation and regression analyses of 146 student responses. All elements of the MUSIC model moderately correlated to deep learning.