This study is designed to explore academic motivation, academic self-efficacy and attitudes toward teaching in pre-service early childhood education teachers and to investigate the relationships among those variables. Data were gathered through questionnaires administered to 251 pre-service early childhood education teachers. Results indicated that academic motivation was significantly related to academic self efficacy. Although participants had high levels of positive attitudes toward teaching, those attitudes neither related to the academic motivation nor to the academic self efficacy. In addition, regression analyses revealed that academic self-efficacy was the only meaningful predictor of academic motivation.