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The study determined the effect of integrating motivation into classroom instruction on students’ achievement in genetics in Keffi Education Zone, Nasarawa State, Nigeria. The study adopted a quasi-experimental, pre-test, post-test, non-randomised control group design. The target population comprised all 1,519 Senior Secondary Three (SS3) Biology students (779 male and 740 female) in the six co-educational public secondary schools in Keffi Local Government Area of Nasarawa State during the 2024/2025 academic session. A sample of 133 SS3 students, drawn as intact classes from two randomly selected schools, took part in the study. Two objectives, two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study, and the hypotheses were tested at the 0.05 level of significance. Data were collected with the Genetics Achievement Test (GAT), which had a reliability index of 0.93. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, while Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses. The findings revealed that students taught with motivation-integrated instruction achieved significantly higher post-test scores in genetics than those taught with the conventional method (F(1, 130) = 94.781, p < 0.05), and that there was no significant difference between the achievement of male and female students taught with motivation (F(1, 68) = 0.077, p > 0.05). The study recommended that Biology teachers should integrate motivational strategies such as praise, rewards, goal-setting and real-life examples into genetics instruction; that government and school administrators should provide adequate instructional materials to support motivational teaching; and that school administrators should periodically organise seminars and workshops to train in-service and pre-service teachers in the use of motivational strategies.