Relation between self-concept, motivation for education and academic achievement: A Slovenian case

This is an analysis of motivation for education and self-concept in 287 high-school fourth-grade students. The principal questions were focused on the relation between students' motivation for education and their self-concept, on the one hand, and on differences between their motivational factors, on the other. The analysis bore on the relation between academic achievement and motivation for education. The results of our research show that self-concept, in particular academic self-concept, is in a significant correlation with motivation for education. Academic self-concept includes students' self-perception of their own abilities for learning and is in relation with each individual's value system. It can be observed through student's attitude towards acquiring knowledge. Our results show that academic self-concept is a basis for development and selection of learning strategies and has the role of a motivational factor. On the other hand, it includes a number of abilities that help students not only to better understand the processes of acquiring knowledge, but also to produce new knowledge of better quality from the acquired data. The results indicate that the students in our sample differed in motivation for education and that higher academic achievement is related to a higher level of motivation.