Impact of Motivation on Students’ Retention in Public Secondary Schools in Rorya District, Tazania

Motivation is the heartbeat to students’ retention. It keep learners active and alive to remain at school until completion. Students who join secondary education have diverse needs as they come from diverse walks of life. Therefore, motivation stimulate them while at school by meeting their diverse personal needs. This study aimed at exploring the impact of motivation on students’ retention in Public secondary schools in Rorya District, Tanzania. The study was based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs theory of motivation. The study adopted a mixed research approach and an explanatory sequential design. The sample sizes of one hundred and twenty six (n=126) respondents obtained through stratified random sampling, purposive, snowball and simple random sampling techniques were involved. Questionnaires, unstructured interviews and a document review checklist were used to collect data. Validity and reliability were checked. The result of test-retest was 0.87. The validity of the tools was assured by sending tools to education foundations research experts. Therefore, the instruments were valid and reliable. Data were analyzed through descriptive statistics with the help of SPSS version 20 and content analysis approach. The findings indicated that motivation greatly influence secondary school students’ retention. The study recommended that, the teachers and all educational stakeholders should actively participate in the motivation of students to continue with the school by ensuring a safe, active parenting role as well as supportive and conducive environment for a student successful completion of his or her studies. Students’ need care, love, and respect to remain at school until completion. Keywords— Motivation, Retention, Public secondary schools. I. BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY Motivation is the force that directs students to achieve their anticipated goals for schooling (Solak, 2012). It refers to any situation which gives the energy to direct and sustain the behaviour (Yilmaz et al., 2017). It is the force whether internal or external which drives an individual towards the accomplishment of the predetermined goals. For learners to achieve their educational goals, they should be very much engaged in school and complete their education cycle. Therefore motivation is one of the major factors which are tremendously required to ensure retention among public secondary school students’. Retaining students in school until they complete is one of the significant indicators of school effectiveness (Crosling, 2017). For instance in Turkish secondary schools many students are unmotivated by issues such as lack of autonomy, less freedom of choice which results in dissatisfaction and lesson disengagement among students(Tasgin & Tunc, 2018). Students who lack freedom and autonomy in school find school boring most of the time and if there is no intervention to cure the situation they are likely to leave school most of the time. Also, Akay (2017) argues that teaching is not healthy and meaningful without motivation. In this case, motivation is the most important ingredient to stimulate learners to participate actively in the teaching International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 5(6) Nov-Dec 2020 | Available online: https://ijels.com/ ISSN: 2456-7620 https://dx.doi. org/10.22161/ijels.56. 7