Gifted Motivation: How Academic Motivation Predicts a Profile of Talent Development in Intellectually Gifted Students

According to the National Association for Gifted Children (2019), two areas needing further exploration among intellectually gifted children are social-emotional development and precursors of gifted underachievement (Steenbergen-Hu et al., 2020). Some research has found that students’ psychosocial perceptions (i.e., self-beliefs) are vital in predicting achievement (Dixson et al., 2023), with academic motivation being especially influential. For example, academic motivation has been found to moderate the relationship between intellectual giftedness and academic achievement (Schick & Phillipson, 2009). However, few studies have comprehensively evaluated gifted students’ motivation styles and related outcomes. To explore these relationships, the current study aims to investigate how academic motivation styles predict psychosocial perceptions and achievement-related behaviors among gifted students. Hierarchical linear regressions (HLRs) were conducted among a sample of 325 students attending two gifted summer programs. Students’ academic motivation was examined with items ranging from intrinsic reasons to go to school (e.g., “Because I learn about things that interest me”), to extrinsic reasons (e.g., “In order to have a better salary later on”), to completely lacking motivation (e.g., “I don’t know what I’m doing in school”). Motivation styles were entered one-by-one in separate HLR steps. Outcome variables were hope, academic selfefficacy, academic self-concept, school belonging, and behavioral, emotional, and intellectual engagement. Results indicated that academic motivation styles predicted small (10.8%) to medium (21.8%) amounts of psychosocial perceptions and medium (14.1%) to large (65.4%) amounts of academic engagement. Intrinsic motivation was the only consistently significant predictor of the outcome variables (p < .001). These results indicate that academic motivation strongly relates to gifted students’ self-beliefs and behaviors. This suggests that academic motivation interventions should be embedded into gifted programming, and that helping students identify something intrinsically motivating is key for keeping them engaged and successful.