Home Environment and Academic Intrinsic Motivation

Academic intrinsic motivation (AIM) is defined as the enjoyment of school learning characterized by a mastery orientation, curiosity, persistence, task endogeny (i.e., pleasure in and orientation toward learning and task involvement), and the learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks. It concerns pleasure derived from the process of learning without receiving external or extrinsic consequences. Its significance for children's learning and development has been increasingly acknowledged over the years due to extensive research indicating that children with higher levels of AIM are more competent in the academic domain from early childhood through early adulthood. Such children show higher achievement on standardized tests as well as teacher-assigned grades, greater sense of academic competence, lower academic anxiety, less extrinsic orientation to learning, and higher educational achievement as ...