Academic Motivation and School Attainment

S ummary . A twenty‐four item self‐rating inventory was constructed to assess academic motivation. Scores on the inventory were compared with teachers' ratings to give evidence of concurrent validity. A test‐retest reliability coefficient of + 0.83 was obtained with an interval of 2 1/2 months. The inventory was given to 2,707 Aberdeen 13‐year‐olds who had previously been given various intellectual tests. School attainment was measured from teachers' estimates scaled against a verbal reasoning test. The scores on the inventory were found to correlate more closely with school attainment than with reasoning ability. Academic motivation scores also distinguished between groups of children who had improved their academic performance after transfer and those who had deteriorated. This distinction could not be attributed simply to social class differences. Even within social class, ‘improvers' had significantly higher scores on the inventory than ‘deteriorators' which suggests that ‘academic motivation’ is not closely related to social class.