THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNIVERSITY EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT ON MOTIVATION OF STUDENTS’ RESEARCH ACTIVITY IN THE CONTEXT OF ACADEMIC SUCCESS

Abstract

The research activity of students develops under the influence of a set of conditions established by the university environment, yet the connection between environmental parameters, motivation and the resulting learning outcomes remains theoretically underclarified. Two loosely coordinated interpretations coexist in the scholarly discourse: the motivation for research activity is understood either as a stable personal disposition or as a situational response to organizational incentives, while its association with academic success is assessed in divergent ways, ranging from direct dependence to a practically negligible one. The aim of the work is to determine through which mechanisms the university educational environm ent mediates students’ motivation for research activity and how this motivation correlates with indicators of academic success. Conceptual-categorial analysis, the structural-functional approach, systematization and content analysis of the regulatory framework of higher education in the versions in force by 2026 are applied. A structural-functional model is proposed that links four circuits of the environment – the normative-target, the communicative-mentoring, the infrastructural-resource and the event-recognition circuits – with types of motivational regulation and with the channels of their influence on success. It is established that the environment affects success predominantly indirectly, through the restructuring of the ratio between autonomous and controlled incentives; external stimulation without support for autonomy yields a short-term increase in involvement while weakening sustained interest. It is shown that high academic success is associated primarily with autonomous motivation, whereas the predominance of instrumental motives is accompanied by formal inclusion with low research productivity.