15.09.2023

Honor for lifetime achievement

HIB Distinguished International Professor Jacquelynne Eccles receives APS Lifetime Achievement Award

Motivational researcher Jacquelynne Eccles, Distinguished International Professor at the Hector Research Institute, has been awarded the prestigious APS William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) for lifetime achievement.

The APS William James Fellow Award honors APS members for their lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology. Recipients must be APS members recognized internationally for their outstanding contributions to scientific psychology. Honorees are recognized annually at the APS Convention.

Jacquelynne Eccles is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include academic motivation and achievement, school and family influences on adolescent development, and gender and ethnicity in STEM fields. She has propelled our comprehension of how adolescents’ drive for achievement evolves within their sociocultural environments and has conducted several substantial longitudinal studies on children’s motivation from school years to adulthood. Her research on after-school activities led to a seminal National Research Council report outlining the most effective ways these activities can meet the developmental needs of adolescents.

Eccles’s Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT) of motivation has become one of the most influential motivational theories in educational and developmental psychology, and her contributions have left an indelible imprint on global programs and policies aimed at enriching the lives of children and youth. A member of the U.S. National Academy of Education, Eccles is a recipient of a 1996 APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award and the Society for the Study of Human Development’s Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Research award, among others.