Achievement motivation and gifted students: A social cognitive perspective

The purpose of this article is to provide an illustrative review of recent research on achievement motivation and gifted students from a social cognitive perspective. The review discusses several constructs that have been a focus of motivation research: perceived competence and self-efficacy, attributions, goal orientations, and intrinsic motivation. For each construct, motivational research from the general motivation literature and from the field of gifted and talented studies are critiqued and compared. The review suggests that a general social cognitive perspective is a useful theoretical framework for research on motivational processes involved in the intellectual and personal development of gifted and talented students and that a process-oriented model is superior to a static model for research on both giftedness and achievement motivation. Implications of the review for future research on motivation and talent development are discussed.