For the most part, educational systems have been wont to see motivation as something that follows from a student’s intellectual aptitude or is put in place by external rewards, with little regard for the underpinnings of psychological health. Yet developmental psychology has an ever growing corpus of work to suggest otherwise: sound mental wellness and strong educational motivation are of one piece. Institutions which make compliance their first concern can be guilty of overlooking psychological health altogether, misreading amotivation and chronic burnout as simple intellectual failings and so not offering the kind of scaffolding that is needed for a student to evolve and find academic drive.
We set out in this empirical study to chart the behavioural and psychological dynamics at play between mental wellness and educational motivation in a range of higher education cohorts. Over the course of two academic years we have followed a multi-wave cohort of 1,850 university students by way of a mixed-methods longitudinal design. To add qualitative dimension to the data we held 90 semi-structured dialogues with developmental psychologists, student wellbeing directors and deans. Our multivariate modelling, encompassing structural equation and Confirmatory Factor Analysis, shows intrinsic motivation and mental wellness to be powerful positive predictors of an enduring academic drive (β = 0.88, p < 0.001) . The opposite is true of amotivation and chronic burnout which have a marked suppressive impact on the trajectory of a student (β = -0.67, p < 0.01) . It is incumbent on higher education to build mental wellness into their pedagogical models if they are to keep motivation alive.