Abstract—In education, there are many students in a class. Each student has its own characteristics in motivation. However, in a class, a single uniform curriculum is applied to all the students. It is difficult to teach every student according to their characteristics. It is necessary to understand student motivation. It needs a great labor to understand the every student motivation. In this paper, we propose a method to understand the student motivation factors. In this method, we get reports from students based on the contextual inquiry. The method extracts words from the report. Using the TF/IDF method, it calculates the weight of every word from the viewpoint of 4 major motivations. The method registers the set of a word and weight values into a dictionary. The method calculates the motivation factors of the target student, summing up the weight of words appearing in the report. High interest for every motivation factor is examined from 74 student reports. Even though there is accuracy difference with the length of the report, the method has classified the reports almost in the same way as manual judgment. The proposed method can reduce the efforts of teachers who have to understand motivation of various students. 

Index Terms—education, MSLQ, contextual inquiry, TF/IDF, motivation

Cite: Wataru Takahashi, Fumiko Harada, Hiromitsu Shimakawa, and Takahiro Koyama, "Extracting Student Motivation Factors in Education with Contextual Inquiry," Journal of Automation and Control Engineering, Vol.1, No.3, pp. 208-212, Sep. 2013. doi: 10.12720/joace.1.3.208-212