An exploration of participative motivations in a community-based online English extensive reading contest with respect to gender difference

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is to describe an online community-based English extensive reading contest to investigate whether the participants' intrinsic, extrinsic, and interpersonal motivations and learning results show significant gender differences. A total of 501 valid questionnaires (285 females and 216 males) from Taiwanese high school students and 15 interviewees from the students receiving awards were the subjects in this study. The findings show that females had a stronger participative intrinsic motivation, while males displayed a higher participative interpersonal motivation. Furthermore, female average scores were higher than the male ones on the comprehension tests. Even though the final results of the total scores for females were still higher than those of males, male scores for the interactivity tests were on average higher than those of females. The phenomena and implications behind the participative motivations are specifically discussed and explained.KEYWORDS: Gender differenceparticipative motivationcommunity-based contestonline English extensive reading AcknowledgementThe authors would like to thank all the people who took part in this study, and we appreciate the assistance from the IWiLL team and Center for Digital Language Research of Tamkang University.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Note on contributorsI-Fan Liu received his Ph.D. degree in Management Information System from National Taiwan University in 2010. He is a Chairman and Assistant Professor of the Department of Information Management at the Oriental Institute of Technology, Taiwan. His current research interests focus on Web-based learning community, online English learning motivation, game-based learning, and online exam.Shelley Shwu-ching Young received her Ph.D. degree in 1996, in instructional design and technology from the Ohio State University at Columbus, Ohio, USA. She is currently a Chair and Professor of the Institute of Learning Sciences at the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Her research interests include E-learning, Game-based learning, Hand-held and Tangible Technologies in Education.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan under contract numbers NSC-100-2511-S-161-001.