The role of professors 'professional competencies on students' academic motivation mediated by social popularity: A case study of Isfahan Farhangian University campuses

Professional competence and social popularity of professors and at the same time students' academic motivation can be considered as three basic components in improving educational processes. In this regard, the present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between professors' professional competence and students' academic motivation with the mediating role of teachers' social popularity. The method of this research is descriptive-correlation and its statistical population consisted of all students of Farhangian University of Isfahan in the academic year 2019-2020 in the number of 3080 people who were selected using Krejcie-Morgan table and stratified sampling method proportional to the sample size of 342 people. To collect the data, a researcher-made questionnaire of professors' professional competence, standard questionnaire of motivation, education of Walrand and a revised questionnaire of social popularity professors from Madandar Arani and Paryad were used. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by professors in the field of educational sciences and Cronbach's alpha method was used for the reliability of the questionnaire. In order to analyze the data, descriptive and inferential statistics were used by SPSS and AMOS statistical software. The results of data analysis showed that there is a direct relationship between professors 'professional competence and students' academic motivation (P <.01) and the social popularity variable mediates this relationship significantly (P <.01). According to the obtained results, it can be concluded that the professional competence and social popularity of professors have an effective role in strengthening the academic motivation of students. Therefore, it is suggested that the results of the present study be used as a framework to improve faculty performance to enhance students' academic motivation.