What motivates students to participate in honors programs: A fine-grained exploration of honors students’ motivational profiles in the Netherlands

Honors programs are extracurricular programs designed to provide talented and ambitious students with academic challenges beyond the standard curriculum. While honors students are generally highly motivated to participate in their honors program, students might be driven by different motives. By incorporating the full motivational spectrum as described by the Self-Determination Theory, this study aimed to understand what motivational profiles could be distinguished in an honors population and how students’ background characteristics were associated with these profiles. To this end, we employed a cross-sectional observational study design to examine seven motivational constructs through a survey administered to four successive cohorts comprising a total of 360 students. These constructs included amotivation, three forms of extrinsic motivation (external regulation, introjected regulation, and identified regulation), and three forms of intrinsic motivation (to know, to accomplish, and to experience stimulation). Three motivational profiles emerged from our honors population, which we called ‘ Overall High ’, ‘ Knowledge oriented’, and ‘ Controlled’ . Furthermore, our results show that honors students with different characteristics were not evenly distributed across the profiles. Male students and international students were more likely to belong to profiles characterized by more controlled motivation, whereas female students and domestic students were more likely to belong to profiles with stronger intrinsic motivation. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.