The relationship between extrinsic motivation and mathematics achievement in South Africa

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the role of non-cognitive skills in academic achievement in the international literature, limited studies on this topic for South Africa exist. For this article, we used data on Grade 9 learners from the 2019 South African Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to investigate the relationship between extrinsic motivation and mathematics achievement. We used multivariate regression analysis where we controlled for a range of learner, home, teacher and school characteristics, and we tested the robustness of our results to using teacher and school fixed effects models. We found a positive association between extrinsic motivation and mathematics scores, and although it was not as large as the association between intrinsic motivation and mathematics scores, it remained strong and statistically significant in all our models. We also found that the strength of the relationship varied across school types and was stronger in poorly-resourced and remote rural schools, suggesting that extrinsic motivation could compensate to some degree for the disadvantage that these learners experience. This is an important finding as extrinsic motivation is potentially amenable to external influences.