Overview
Achievement motivation may be understood as an individual’s concern for becoming successful, doing well, meeting obligations, overcoming obstacles, and attaining a sense of excellence. While early efforts sought to understand achievement motivation as an overall construct and what contributed to it, contemporary research has focused more on individual components of motivation, such as self-efficacy, or their results, such as actual achievement. These developments were driven by a general failure to find robust links between achievement motivation and domains of actual achievement, such as academic achievement.
Achievement Motivation
The study of achievement motivation grew from the field of psychology. The concept first emerged as one of the basic needs identified in Henry Murray’s (1938) groundbreaking theory of human motivation. Murray proposed that internal states of disequilibrium drive individuals’ behaviors and that disequilibrium emerges when individuals have a sense...
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Levesque, R.J.R. (2016). Achievement Motivation. In: Levesque, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_23-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_23-2
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