Higher Secondary Level Students’ Motivation in Pursuing Tertiary Level of Education: A Descriptive Investigation

Motivation is a goal-oriented behaviour. It influences a student’s overall academic activity. To study Higher Secondary level students’ motivations to pursue tertiary education, the investigators sampled 264 higher secondary students from 5 different government schools of the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, India. To analyse data - four hypotheses were formulated and tested with the help of descriptive (mean, median, SD, SK, & KU) and inferential statistics (t-test, ANOVA & post-hoc test). In this study, it has been found that with respect to motivations at the Higher Secondary level in tertiary education, female students’ motivation is better than male students and urban area students’ mean motivation is higher than their rural counterparts. On the other hand, it has also been found that Arts and Commerce students’ motivation mean scores are higher than Science stream students while the General and SC students’ motivation means are better than OBC and ST students. ST students’ motivation to pursue tertiary level of education is found to be the lowest compared to the General, OBC and SC students.