MOTIVATION DIFFERENCES ON DOING SPORTS ACTIVELY AT THE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND SPORTS TEACHER IN ACCORDANCE WITH THEIR GRADE LEVELS

The purpose of the present research is examining the differences between motivations of Physical Education and Sports (PES) Teaching Department students, who actively do sports in team sports and individual sports branches, in accordance with their grade levels.  The participants of the present research are female (n=199) and male (n=344) the total of 543 athletes with age average of 21,25 ±2,66, who study at PES Teaching Departments of Ege and Uludag Universities and do different branches of sports. Sport Motivation Scale (SMS) developed by Pelletier et al. (1995) and adapted for Turkish athletes and tested for reliability and validity by Kazak (2004) was used to collect data.     According to data collected from the participants, there are statistically significant differences between different grade levels in terms of “intrinsic motivation” (p<.05) and “intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation”, which is a sub-dimension of intrinsic motivation (p<.01) values. Fourth grade students have the highest average of intrinsic motivation while second grade students have the lowest, and first grade students have the highest level of intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation, while second grade students have the lowest average. According to the data related to grade levels by gender, the variations among female students in terms of intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation aren’t statistically significant, while the variations among male participants in terms of intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation and “amotivation” values are statistically significant (p<.05). Among the male participants, fourth grade students have the highest intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation average, while second graders have the lowest; and second grade students have the highest average for amotivation while the third graders have the lowest average for the related value. Data analyses were conducted on SPSS 17.0, and the variations in motivation by grade levels were tested with Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis tests.