Scouting my topic

          After reading Professor Goeller's comments on my previous post, I decided to take on his suggestion about refining my focus when it came to motivation in college students. I'm going to begin my research using the following question: How does major choice affect academic motivation? Basing my research on this question will help give me some direction in my research paper, and I'm genuinely interested in how motivation is affected depending on a student's major. While searching online, the key terms I found most useful were college, motivation, and major choice. I found a few articles, a few blogs, and to my surprise, a lot of "edu" websites regarding the topic. I found one article ("Determinants influencing college major choice and their relationship to self-determined motivation, achievement, and satisfaction") specifically talking about my research question which I'm sure is going to be one of my sources. Other potential sources are: a book recommended to me by Professor Goeller called "Drive" by Daniel Pink and a scholarly article called "Motivation for Major Choice in Relation to College Major Satisfaction." I did not have much success in the news, scholar, or book sections of google other than these sources; but, there seemed to be a lot more in the normal google search. Some other ideas that came to me as a result of this search were how motivation affects a students academics, the difference in motivation depending on whether a student is a minority or not, and the link between major choice and satisfaction.

             

Two of the links I found which I think are going to be useful for my paper are the following:

• https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/11637

• http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_college_student_development/v046/46.3dennis.html

These links lead to scholarly articles which I think will be very useful starting points for my research. The first one directly talks about my question, "How does major choice affect academic motivation?" and the second one potentially has some new ideas I can cover. For example, the second article brings up how motivation affects academic success, which seems like another great research topic. To finish up this blog, I could not really find any controversy or differing viewpoints on my topic just yet; but personally, I think that students who choose a major solely for the potential money they could be making will have lower motivation than students who choose a major they are genuinely interested in. Although this might seem obvious, there is no telling what I could potentially find while researching this topic.