Higher Levels of Intrinsic Motivation Are Related to Higher Levels of Class Performance for Male but Not Female Students

Our students are naturally curious, with powerful intrinsic motives to understand their world. Accordingly, we, as teachers, must capitalize on this inherently active and curious nature so that learning becomes a lifelong activity where students take initiative for learning, are skilled in learning, and want to learn new things. Achieving this goal requires an understanding of student attitudes, beliefs, characteristics, and motivations. To achieve this goal, we administered the intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI) to assess our students' interest and enjoyment, perceived choice, and perceived competence while taking our undergraduate exercise physiology class (46 students; 20 female students and 26 male students). The interest and enjoyment subscale is considered the self-reported measure of intrinsic motivation. The perceived choice and perceived competence concepts are theorized to be positive predictors of both self-reported and behavioral measures of intrinsic motivation. Our results documented a significant increase in course grade with an increase in survey score for the interest and enjoyment subscale of the IMI when female and male students were combined. Specifically, each increase in survey score for the interest and enjoyment subscale of the IMI was associated with a significant ("P" less than 0.05) increase of 3.9% in course grade. However, the increase in survey score was associated with a significantly greater ("P" less than 0.05) increase in course grade for male (6.1%) compared with female (0.3%) students. These results have implications for both classroom practice and educational reform policies.