Relating autonomous motivation, academic self-concept, and early academic achievement
Table 4, left panel shows the bivariate correlations (Pearson correlation coefficients) between the variables used in this study, computed for the entire group of STEM students. As expected, there is a moderate positive correlation between prior high school result and early academic achievement (i.e., overall academic exam result and academic obtained credits). A small but significant positive correlation exists between academic self-concept and autonomous motivation, between autonomous motivation and early academic achievement, and between academic self-concept and early academic achievement respectively. There is no correlation between controlled motivation and achievement indicators, and a small negative correlation between controlled motivation and academic self-concept.
Since the descriptive statistics in Table 2 show significant differences in autonomous motivation and self-concept for male and female students, we performed a gender-specific correlation analysis for the included variables and significant gender differences are found (Table 4, middle and right panel). The correlation pattern of male students (Table 4, middle panel) is comparable to the correlation pattern of the entire group of STEM students (Table 4, left panel), which is not surprising since 77% of the population is male. Female students (Table 4, right panel) display a slightly different pattern: there is no significant correlation between prior high school result and academic self-concept, between autonomous motivation and academic self-concept, nor between autonomous motivation and early academic achievement. Both male and female students have a small positive correlation between academic self-concept and early academic achievement.