Student motivation is not one measure. It includes enjoying new learning, accepting challenging work, seeing a practical purpose in school, persisting through difficulty, and feeling confident enough to study independently. In PISA 2022, about half of students across OECD countries said they loved learning new things in school, while 47% said they enjoyed challenging schoolwork. England’s more recent pupil surveys reported that 70% of pupils in years 7 to 13 were very or fairly motivated to learn in May 2025.
Contents
- Intrinsic motivation and enjoyment
- Purpose, growth mindset, and mathematics
- Anxiety and readiness for the future
- Family and teacher support
- Self-directed learning and study behaviours
- Motivation trends among pupils in England
Intrinsic motivation and enjoyment
Intrinsic motivation is reflected in whether students enjoy learning for its own sake. The OECD’s Empowering students to be motivated lifelong learners: PISA 2022 Results (Volume V) found that only about 50% of students across OECD countries reported loving learning new things in school. A slightly smaller share, 47%, reported enjoying challenging schoolwork. These figures describe mostly 15-year-old students surveyed in PISA 2022; they are not a measure of every age group.
The international average hides large differences. At least 85% of students in Guatemala, Peru, and Viet Nam reported enjoying learning new things in school. More than 85% of low-performing students in those three countries also reported enjoying learning new things. At the other end of the reported range, around 33% or fewer of students in Czechia and Poland said they enjoyed learning new things in school.
These results suggest that academic performance and enjoyment should not be treated as identical outcomes. The finding about low-performing students in Guatemala, Peru, and Viet Nam is especially important: students can report strong enjoyment of learning even when their measured performance is low. The OECD figures are descriptive survey results, so they show patterns rather than proving that enjoyment causes achievement.
Purpose, growth mindset, and mathematics
Motivation can also come from seeing why school matters. In PISA 2022, 89% of students across OECD countries reported a strong desire to do well in mathematics class. Separately, 67% agreed that school had taught them things useful for working. Germany was the only country in the report where under 50% of students said school had taught them things useful for working. The share was also under 50% among skilled performers in Germany and Poland, and among low performers in Germany.
Students’ beliefs about improvement were less widespread than their desire to succeed. Across OECD countries, 58% reported having a general growth mindset, but only 35% reported a mathematics-specific growth mindset. Boys were, on average, 7 percentage points more likely than girls to report a mathematics growth mindset.
| PISA 2022 indicator | OECD-country result |
|---|---|
| Strong desire to do well in mathematics | 89% |
| School taught useful things for working | 67% |
| General growth mindset | 58% |
| Mathematics-specific growth mindset | 35% |
The difference between general and mathematics-specific growth mindset matters for study habits. A student may believe people can improve in principle but feel less certain that their own mathematics ability can change. PISA 2022 also found a 17-percentage-point higher self-directed-learning confidence gap among students who believed school teaches useful job-related knowledge, compared with less confident peers. This is an association, not a causal estimate.
Anxiety and readiness for the future
Motivation often competes with worry. Across OECD countries in PISA 2022, 65% of students worried about getting poor marks in mathematics, 55% felt anxious about failing mathematics, and about 40% felt nervous, helpless, or anxious while solving mathematics problems or doing homework.
The relationship with enjoyment was substantial. Less-anxious students were 22 percentage points more likely than more-anxious students to report loving challenging schoolwork. They were also 10 percentage points more likely to report loving learning new things in school. These comparisons describe groups in the survey and do not establish that reducing anxiety alone would produce the reported difference.
Mathematics anxiety was also associated with performance. After socioeconomic adjustment, a one-point increase in the mathematics-anxiety index was associated with an 18-point decrease in mathematics performance, on average across OECD countries. The country pattern varied: the reported association was a 27-point decrease in Denmark and a 6-point decrease in Brunei Darussalam, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador.
The trend was not uniformly upward or downward across countries and periods. In Korea, the share of students reporting that they got very nervous doing mathematics problems fell by 11 percentage points between 2012 and 2022. At the same time, almost 50% of students across OECD countries worried that they were not prepared for life after compulsory education. Future readiness is therefore another part of the motivation picture: students may want to succeed while remaining uncertain about what school prepares them to do next.
Family and teacher support
Students’ learning attitudes were more positive in several groups reporting frequent family engagement. Among students whose parents often talked with them about how they were doing at school, around 50% reported loving learning new things in school. Among students whose parents had fewer conversations about school progress, the comparable figure was around 40%.
The same pattern appeared in problem-solving activities. Around 70% of students whose parents often talked about school progress enjoyed activities that helped them find new ways to solve problems, compared with around 60% among students whose parents had fewer conversations. More than 65% of students whose parents frequently took an interest in what they were learning agreed that class activities helped them think of new ways to solve problems. The figure was around 55% among students whose parents took less interest.
Teacher relationships were also linked with anxiety. In PISA 2022, a one-point increase in the quality-of-student-teacher-relationship index was associated with a 0.13-point decrease in mathematics anxiety after accounting for mathematics performance. This is a survey association, not evidence that a particular relationship intervention would reduce anxiety by exactly 0.13 points.
Family expectations can support effort but may also feel restrictive. Almost 60% of students in Brunei Darussalam, the Philippines, and Uzbekistan reported feeling family pressure to follow a specific post-compulsory-education path. Across OECD countries, fewer than 35% reported that kind of pressure. The figures measure reported pressure, not whether students ultimately followed those paths.
Self-directed learning and study behaviours
Motivated study increasingly involves finding, evaluating, and using information independently. In PISA 2022, 73% of students across OECD countries reported no trouble finding learning resources online by themselves. However, only 51% said they could easily judge the quality of online information. Fewer than 50% discussed the accuracy of online information with teachers or in class.
Confidence differed by performance group. Sixty percent of low-performing students across OECD countries could not easily gauge the quality of online information, while 57% of skilled performers said they could easily judge it. These statements use different comparison frames from the source report and should not be combined into a single percentage-point calculation.
Self-directed-learning confidence was linked with concrete study behaviours. Students with greater confidence were 22 percentage points more likely to ask questions when they did not understand class material, 20 percentage points more likely to check their work for mistakes, and 24 percentage points more likely to check homework before handing it in. The gap for asking questions ranged from 12 percentage points in Poland to 35 points in Viet Nam.
The mathematics examples were similarly pronounced. In Korea, Malaysia, and Chinese Taipei, confident self-directed learners were more than 40 percentage points more likely to report putting effort into mathematics assignments. Across OECD countries, about 60% of confident self-directed learners connected new mathematics material to prior lessons, compared with 35% of less-confident peers.
For students, these findings point toward observable behaviours rather than motivation as a fixed personality trait: asking for clarification, checking work, evaluating online sources, and connecting new ideas with earlier lessons were all associated with greater self-directed-learning confidence.
Motivation trends among pupils in England
England’s Department for Education surveys provide a separate, more recent picture. In May 2025, 70% of pupils in years 7 to 13 said they were very or fairly motivated to learn. The corresponding reported shares were 67% in March 2022, 73% in June 2022, 71% in May 2023, and 75% in April 2024.
Some earlier waves used a narrower year range. Motivation was reported at 79% among pupils in years 7 to 11 in November 2022 and 74% among the same year range in March 2023. Because the population covered differs between some waves, these values should be read as survey snapshots rather than a perfectly continuous time series.
| England survey wave | Pupil group | Very or fairly motivated to learn |
|---|---|---|
| March 2022 | Years 7–13 | 67% |
| June 2022 | Years 7–13 | 73% |
| November 2022 | Years 7–11 | 79% |
| May 2023 | Years 7–13 | 71% |
| April 2024 | Years 7–13 | 75% |
| May 2025 | Years 7–13 | 70% |
The May 2025 results also show differences by stage and response category. Eighteen percent of England key-stage-3 pupils said they were very motivated to learn. Among key-stage-4 pupils, 24% said they were not very motivated. Among year-12 and year-13 pupils, 24% said they were very motivated.
The England figures are self-reported results for the named pupil years and survey waves. The Department for Education notes that survey methods changed over time, so historical comparisons require that methodological caveat. Together with PISA 2022, the results show why student motivation statistics need context: enjoyment, purpose, anxiety, support, confidence, age group, geography, and question wording can all change the picture.
Sources
- Empowering students to be motivated lifelong learners: PISA 2022 Results (Volume V)
- Students’ predispositions to learning: PISA 2022 Results (Volume V)
- How are students’ relationships with families and teachers associated with their use of sustained learning strategies?: PISA 2022 Results (Volume V)
- Students’ readiness for self-directed learning: PISA 2022 Results (Volume V)
- From data to insights: PISA 2022 Results (Volume V)
- Parent, pupil and learner voice: May 2025
- National behaviour survey academic year 2024 to 2025