Abstract—It is crucial for freshmen and sophomores to form their learning motivations to meet their academic and social needs in the early stage of higher education. This paper aims to discuss their learning motivations from students’ perspectives. Results of data analysis indicate that most of the freshmen and sophomores, directly driven by their academic achievement and social-emotion well-being, have positive learning motivations. They are confused to form their own effective learning methods because of their sense of “distance” with teacher and higher scores unmatched their abilities. Qualitative research revealed that it makes students unable to determine their learning purpose accurately and consequently turn to blindly following the learning motivations of their roommates or classmates. The objective feedback of these new findings in this research to teachers could help them take more effective measures to optimize teaching. The reasonable guidance of experienced teachers plays a key role in fostering positive learning motivation. 

Keywords—higher education, learning motivations, qualitative research

Cite: Hengshuo Liu and Yanyan Hu, "Research on Learning Motivations of Freshmen  and Sophomores: From Students’ Perspective," International Journal of Learning and Teaching, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 663-668, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.