Motivation, Personality and Academic Achievement: Does Academic Motivation explain Variation in Academic Achievement beyond Personality and Intellect?

Abstract

Obtaining a good education particularly a tertiary education has links with many important lifestyle and health outcomes but requires students’ to be significantly self-motivated. This study aimed to explore the relationship between motivation and academic achievement to determine whether motivation constructs have incremental validity over conventional predictors of academic achievement. Participants were surveyed using measures of intelligence, trait and facet measures of personality and academic motivation. Correlational analysis and linear regression were used to explore the data to identify what type of relationships existed between variables. Facet measures of Conscientiousness and intrinsic motivation showed higher correlations with academic achievement than trait measures. Motivation measures did not show incremental validity over intelligence and Conscientiousness though amotivation accounted for an amount of variance found significant in other studies indicating the present study suffered from low statistical power. The main significant influences on academic achievement were intelligence and Conscientiousness facet achievement striving with low motivation having more influence on achievement than high motivation. While results should be generalized cautiously they indicate first year students’ with low intelligence, Conscientiousness and high amotivation are at risk of lower academic achievement with interventions targeting Conscientiousness and amotivation the most likely improve academic achievement.