Abstract

• The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of students' motivation on their academic achievement in science at the middle school level. The design adopted in this study was a descriptive research. The participants were (1043) Grade-seven students from four middle schools and four high schools. The instruments used for this study were a questionnaire for students’ motivation to learn science and science achievement test. The questionnaire was based on Tuan, Chin and Shich, (2005) which contains six dimensions. The questionnaire included (35) items of five-point Likert-scale by five responses: strongly disagree, disagree, cannot understand, agree and strongly agree. Science achievement test was based on the content area from Chapter (1) to (4) in Grade Seven General Science Textbook. It included objective items, short questions and long questions items. A descriptive statistics was used to study the impact of students’ motivation to learn science and their academic achievement in science. Moreover, Pearson-product moment correlation was used to study the impact of students’ motivation to learn science and their academic achievement in science. It was found that students’ motivation to learn science is moderately correlated to their academic achievement in science. It means that highly motivated students perform better than lowly motivated students on science achievement test.