The Impact of Academic Self-efficacy on Academic Motivation: The Mediating and Moderating Role of Future Orientation Among Italian Undergraduate Students

The literature recognizes that students’ beliefs concerning their academic skills play a fundamental role in their motivation to achieve academic success. In this chapter, we focused on the investigation of the role of future orientation on education (i.e., conscious ideas about one's future education) in the relationship between academic self-efficacy and academic motivation. To this purpose, a cross-sectional study was performed on a sample of 1008 undergraduate Italian students (49.1% males) aged 19–23 years old (mean = 20.23; standard deviation = 0.97). The participants filled in an online questionnaire with the Italian versions of the Perceived Academic Self-Efficacy Scale, Academic Motivation Scale, and Future Education Scale of the Prospective Life Course Questionnaire. Controlling for age and main academic subjects, path analysis showed that academic self-efficacy positively predicted future orientation and that students’ future orientation played a full mediating role between academic self-efficacy and extrinsic motivation and amotivation, as well as performing a partial mediating role between academic self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation. Moreover, future orientation moderated the pathway from academic self-efficacy to amotivation, which suggests that high future orientation can buffer the negative effect of low academic self-efficacy on students’ academic amotivation. The findings of this study have significant implications for improving academic motivation.