Relationship between Academic Stress and Achievement Motivation: Influence of Gender and Course

Higher education studies have become stressful due to the extremely high work load, future consciousness in students and due to expectations of significant others. This affects achievement motivation of the students. In this backdrop, present study was designed to find out the relationship between academic stress and achievement motivation along with the influence of course studied and gender. A total of 120 students were randomly selected from the city of Mysore. They were administered academic stress scale by Lin and Chen, (2009) and achievement motivation scale by Muthee and Thomas (2009). The data was collected by both Google forms and direct interaction. The data was analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics. Inferential statistics included Pearson’s product moment correlation and two-way ANOVA. Results revealed that as the academic stress increased achievement motivation also increased linearly and significantly. Students pursuing commerce course had highest achievement motivation scores, followed by students pursuing arts and science courses. Course pursued did not have significant influence over academic stress. Female students’ experienced significantly higher academic stress as well had higher achievement motivation than male students.