What relates most strongly to school motivation?

What is it about?

The goal of our study was to find out what factors are most important for students' motivation from kindergarten to the end of secondary school. A lot of empirical research has been conducted on this topic, which has been summarized within meta-analyses. We combined the results of these meta-analyses to get a broad overview of the research, and compared the importance of different aspects for students’ school motivation. This allowed us to integrate data from over 25 million students. We considered aspects of learning that focus on the students, for example, how well students do in school, how they view their own accomplishments, and their background variables. Our findings show that students’ achievement is most strongly related to their academic motivation. This means that if students can learn successfully, they will be more motivated in the process. Also, we find that students who are confident in their abilities are more motivated, suggesting that teachers can help students to be motivated by helping them learning and providing positive feedback. We also considered aspects of instruction, focusing on the role of teachers. Our results suggest that for students to be motivated in school, the teacher-student relationship is highly important: students who have positive relationships with their teachers will be more motivated.

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Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our findings highlight the role of teachers, who can help students feel motivated by providing good learning opportunities, and building positive relationships in the classroom. Policymakers and school leaders should invest in improving the skills of their teachers, especially to increase the quality of teaching and their relationship with students.

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