Students´ Learning in Brazilian Vocational Education: motives, investment, and satisfaction

Abstract

The exploratory and qualitative study from which this article has been cut had the objective of characterizing the motivation for learning by Brazilian Vocational Education students, within the framework of the Students’ Approaches to Learning (SAL) theory. A total of 20 junior students, aged 16 to 18 years, enrolled in Vocational Education at the Federal Institute of Education, Science, Technology of Rio de Janeiro, located in the same city in 2014 took part in the study and were asked about their motivational orientation for learning. In order to collect the data, semi-structured interviews were conducted based on a script looking at several dimensions of motivational orientation, including: Intention (personal reasons for learning), Investment (amount of energy usually used in learning), and Satisfaction (degree of satisfaction with learning). The answers to the interviews were submitted to a thematic content analysis. The results are consistent with the image about the variation of the students’ motivational orientation towards learning in general, provided by the SAL theory, that is, instrumental motivation, intrinsic motivation and achievement motivation. However, they show some specificity and novelty, revealed by new sub-variants of those variants as well as a degraded pattern of motivation. The results are discussed in light of the characteristics of the students interviewed and the particularities of Brazilian Vocational Education.