Motivation And Academic Achievement

The Role of Motivation in Academic Achievements

Many people would find it difficult to understand why some students perform well in academics while others perform abysmally in all spheres of their academic endeavors. Without a proper investigation and understanding of the fundamental cause, one would just draw a conclusion that the student who fails to strive in school is not good or perhaps not intelligent enough. However, studies have shown that academic achievements go beyond just being enrolled in academic institution. This paper will attempt to investigate the causative factors, motivating factors and the roles they play for an individual to achieve academic success or fail. But before that, the meaning of key concepts such as motivation,

Experts have categorized motivation into two major groups of internal motivation and external motivation. The individual influenced by the external motivation with an independent goal takes up a specific function, the internal motivation on the other hand provides the sufficient grounds for doing a task. Psychologically, it is believed that motivation should be taken into consideration in education because of its effective relationship with new learning, capabilities, approaches, and behaviors. psychologists present motivation for academic achievement as one of the primary concepts for defining such type of motivation. Motivation for academic achievement is associated to behaviors which lead to learning and achievement. In other words, motivation for academic achievement is such a universal predisposition towards performing a task successfully in a particular context and assessing the performance spontaneously. This internal motivation, is said to be a psycho-cognitive condition which is acquired once the individual sees him/herself to have independence. The sources of this motivation can be Internationally, Nationally, institutionally, and individually (self-motivation) initiated. A typical example was the increase in students’ performance as a result of strengthening the management capacity and accountability of Liberian educational sector. Under this structure, classrooms were built or rehabilitated; more than one million textbooks and 20,000 teachers were employed, millions of instructional materials were procured, etc. following the reopening of schools after the Ebola crisis. When the funding phased out partner organizations like USAID, UNICEF, OSIWA, EU, Save the Children, and Plan International,