Chair UGent - GavoorGeluk
Sustainably motivating children and students is plodding and struggling. It proceeds by trial and error, with parents and teachers come across themselves as well. While motivating sometimes takes energy if you have to pull and tug, it can also release energy in you and young people if you can do it together.
Objectives
This chair aims to:
(a) the development, validation and dissemination of a Motivation and Well-Being Monitor for students and secondary school teachers;
as well as
(b) fund the development, validation and dissemination of online training programmes to strengthen the resilience and motivation of secondary school students.
Donor
Fonds GavoorGeluk
Period
2023 - current year
Supervisor
Prof. Maarten Vansteenkiste is a professor of developmental and motivational psychology at Ghent University. In his research, he attempts to develop the Self-Determination Theory, a well-known and strongly empirically validated theory. He is considered an expert in motivational psychology worldwide and wrote the book "Vitamins for Growth: Nourishing Development from the Self-Determination Theory" with Bart Soenens, his friend and fellow academic (Vansteenkiste & Soenens, 2015). He is interested in studying both theoretically and empirically the link between Self-Determination and other motivational frameworks and uses the theory as a source of inspiration for the study of motivational dynamics in numerous life domains, such as education, parenting, health care, ecology, work, and sports and exercise. He has published frequently on these topics in top journals in the international literature. He was recognized as a "highly cited researcher" in 2019 and 2020.
He currently supervises numerous postgraduate, doctoral and master's students. He gives numerous lectures on the relevance of Self-Determination Theory to a wide audience of teachers, sports coaches, managers, therapists and parents.