Student and Teacher Motivation, in Charts

Ask teens about how motivated they are to do well in school and hopeful they are feeling about the future, and the overall outlook is fairly sunny—in some cases, decidedly more so than it was two years ago.

But when you ask educators a similar question about their students and themselves, their answers paint a very different picture.

That’s according to the results of two nationally representative surveys conducted by the EdWeek Research Center between December 2022 and February 2023.

Perhaps the starkest difference between 13- to 19-year-olds and educators: Thirty-eight percent of students said that as of 2023, the pandemic had made them less motivated to do their best in school. But a whopping 80 percent of educators said that the pandemic had made students less motivated.

There is, however, one area where students and educators (teachers, principals, and district leaders) are in near total agreement, and that’s on how motivated teachers are to teach students. About 80 percent of students and educators say that teachers in their schools are motivated to do their best.

The following charts present a clearer picture of how student and teacher motivation are shaping up this school year, based on the perspectives of nationally representative samples of 1,011 students and 1,058 teachers, principals, and district leaders.