Differences in motivations and academic achievement

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of pupils' self-motivation on academic achievement in science across countries. By using the OECD´s Programme for International Student Assessment 2006 (PISA 2006) test, we find that self-motivation has a positive effect on students' performance. Instrumental Variables Quantile Regression is used to analyze the existence of different estimated coefficients over the scores distribution, allowing us to deal with the potential endogeneity of self-motivation. We find that the impact of intrinsic motivation on academic performance depends on the pupil's score. Our findings support the importance of designing focalized programs for different populations that foster their motivation towards learning.