UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI
Faculty, Department: Faculty of Education, Department of Education
Author: Roivainen, Annu Johanna
Title: Study motivation and situation motivation in an informal education: 11-year-old pupils at Heureka’s Open questions -exhibition.
Subject, Level, Month and year, Number of pages:
Education, M.A.Thesis, November 2003, 80 p. (16 app.)
Abstract
The aim of this research was to find out the factors affecting the educational and career choices of an adolescent. The main question was what kind of connection has informal learning and background factors (such as respondent's age and parents and their educational background) with choice making process. In this study as an example of informal learning environment is science centre Heureka in Vantaa. The research is quantitative and the data was collected with(?) questionnaire in schools which are located in metropolitan area. 282 (peruskoulun 8.luokkalainen) and 282 (lukion 2.luokkalainen) participated in the research.
In the beginning of the research report different kinds of theories about educational and career choices are introduced. After the theory section comes the results of this study. The results shows that young are most interested in commercial and technical fields. Other interesting career options were quite clearly divided in to so called women's and men's fields. This was more obvious with the pupils at the upper secondary school than pupils at the comprehensive school. Girls' educational wishes were in both age groups higher than boys. The education level of parents had a significant relation to children’s success in school and their educational wishes. E.g. those children who had high-educated parents wanted to go to university more likely than other children. However, pupils felt that parents' example and their expectations didn't highly affect their educational and career choices.
The factors which affected most the educational and career choices were the content of a job and inner motivation. There is a relative small but existing relation/link between informal learning environments (e.g. hobbies, media, visits to science centres) and educational and career choices. Boys thought more than girls that informal learning environment has an effect on educational and career choices. Also the pupils who succeeded worse in school and those who wanted to make unusual career choices agreed with that. Those pupils who had high-educated parents experienced that science centres were more impressive than those who didn’t have.
Relation between inner motivation and educational and career choices is much stronger than educational and career choices relation to informal learning, parents’ effect, and formal learning (e.g. vocational guidance). To support the choice process of adolescents, it's important to pay attention to improvement of vocational guidance. Also the supporting of informal learning has to be seen as essential
Key words
Educational and career choice, youth, informal learning, formal learning, science centre
Where deposited
The Library of the Faculty of Education (also available at Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre
