MOTIVATION DIMENSIONS OF BUSINESS ANALYSES STUDENTS IN THE DISTANCE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

As teachers of statistics and mathematics, we often find that students are intimidated by the difficulty of these subjects and give up learning too early, resulting in a failing semester. To avoid this and to support the learning process effectively, our department has set up a research workshop on teaching methodology. The results of one of the research projects of this workshop are presented in this paper. We wanted to determine whether there was a correlation between students' motivation to learn and their perceptions of each methodological subject. To this end, as a pilot, students in the Business Analysis course were asked to complete a questionnaire that included all statements from the Academic Motivation Scale and questions related to the enjoyment, fulfilment and usefulness of the course. However, due to the pandemic, the direction of our research was to find out how students with different levels of self-determination react to distance learning. To this end, we collected the department's online teaching experiences, supplemented by interviews with students. This gave us a picture of how learning in isolation affected students' motivation to learn. In this paper, we first investigate whether students in the Business Analysis course are more likely to be intrinsically or extrinsically motivated. The results show a mixed composition of students: we have very few demotivated students, and intrinsic factors are to a small extent more prevalent than extrinsic motivational items. Based on the self-determination index, three groups of students were distinguished according to their attitudes towards learning. Based on these categories and interviews with students, we collected information on how distance learning affected our students in terms of motivation, their problems, and what skills the pandemic situation helped them develop. The second part of the paper presents these results.