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The field of achievement motivation is concept and data rich, housing more than a dozen major theories, all of which have withstood empirical scrutiny. Their very success, however, has enabled them to flourish within siloed territories. Such fragmentation creates major problems for educators, interventionists, and researchers entering the field. They are faced with a splintered and confusing picture of student motivation. Researchers new to the field find it difficult to see the commonalities or compare the differences across theories. Interventionists cannot design comprehensive educational programs, nor can teachers form coherent mental models of the field. This paper offers four guideposts to aid in the principled integration of motivational theories: (1) motivational resilience, an umbrella construct encompassing the core observable features of motivation—the energy, direction, and durability of action; (2) academic identity, which provides common ground for the many self-systems featured in motivational theories; (3) complex social ecologies, which serve as a home for motivationally-relevant features of classrooms and other important contexts, and the higher-order meso- and macrosystems that pervade them; and (4) developmental embeddedness. Together, these organizational guideposts sketch the outlines of an overarching framework useful for mapping the place and function of core constructs from motivational theories. To a field that already provides a differentiated, dense, and detailed understanding of student motivation, integrative efforts would add the kind of comprehensiveness, coherence, and comprehensibility that can foster even greater theoretical and empirical progress and the design of even more effective educational interventions.

Although motivational theories agree that environmental factors (like interpersonal relationships and pedagogical practices) are crucial in shaping students’ motivational development, few comprehensive conceptualizations of motivational contexts have been proposed. Instead, individual theories tend to focus on the contextual antecedents of the specific self-processes each prioritizes (e.g., self-efficacy, achievement goals). This has produced a cloud of disparate contextual factors that practitioners and interventionists, trying to apply work from the field as a whole, can find fragmented and confusing. Drawing on bioecological, phenomenological, ecocultural, and situative models, we outline an overarching framework that views motivational contexts as complex dynamic multilevel social ecologies. We explore three ways such a framework can help create a more comprehensive and comprehensible picture of the contextual antecedents identified by current theories of motivation. First, we examine the complexity inherent in microsystems, like the classroom, and propose three strategies for identifying motivationally relevant features. Second, we focus on students’ multiple worlds or mesosystems and outline different ways they can be organized and operate to shape motivation. Third, we consider macrosystems and highlight how societal forces, organized in interlocking systems of risk and resources, create stratified and unequal niches that differentially support the motivation of students from diverse backgrounds. Consistent with other researchers, we argue that such overarching frameworks are both integrative and generative. They not only offer places for the range of factors already identified by motivational theories, but also suggest avenues for discovering additional factors and examining how they work together to shape student motivation and its development.

Developmentalists have increasingly concluded that systems approaches to resilience provide a useful higher-order home for the study of the development of coping. Building on previous work on the complementarity of resilience and coping, this paper had two goals: (1) to propose a set of strategies for examining the role of coping in processes of resilience, and (2) to test their utility in the academic domain, using poor relationships with the teacher as a risk factor, and classroom engagement as an outcome. This study examined whether coping serves as a: (1) promotive factor, supporting positive development at any level of risk; (2) pathway through which risk contributes to development; (3) protective factor that mitigates the effects of risk; (4) reciprocal process generating risk; (5) mechanism through which other promotive factors operate; (6) mechanism through which other protective factors operate; and (7) participant with other supports that shows cumulative or compensatory effects. Analyses showed that academic coping at this age was primarily a mediator of risk and support, and a promotive factor that added to engagement for students with multiple combinations of risk and support. Implications are discussed, along with next steps in exploring the role of coping in processes of resilience.

Adolescents face many academic pressures that require good coping skills, but coping skills can also depend on social resources, such as parental support and fewer negative interactions. The aim of this study was to determine if parental support and parental negative interactions concurrently and longitudinally relate to adolescents’ ways of academic coping, above and beyond the impact of three types of academic stress, students’ achievement at school (i.e., grades in school), and age. Survey data were collected from 839 Australian students in grades 5 to 10 (Mage = 12.2, SD = 1.72; 50% girls). Students completed measures of support and negative interactions with parents; academic stress from workload, external pressure (teachers/parents) to achieve, and intrapsychic pressure for high achievement; and ways of academic coping that were grouped into two positive and two negative types. Hypothesized associations were tested concurrently and from one year to the next using path modeling. Beyond the numerous significant influences of academic stress and achievement on coping, and control for age and COVID-19 timing, adolescents with more parental support reported more use of engagement coping (e.g., strategizing) and comfort-seeking, whereas those who reported more negative interactions with parents reported more use of disengagement coping (e.g., concealment) and escape. In the longitudinal model, parental support predicted an increase in engagement and comfort-seeking and a decrease in disengagement coping, whereas negative interaction with parents predicted an increase in disengagement coping. Overall, the findings support the view that coping with academic stressors will continue to depend on parent-adolescent relationships even into the teen years.

This study examined the reciprocal dynamics of teacher autonomy support with student motivation and engagement during late elementary and early middle school. A total of 861 students in grades 5–7 reported on three components of teacher autonomy support (choice, relevance, and respect), as well as their own engagement and self-system processes (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) at the beginning and end of the same school year. Examination of feedforward effects showed that changes in aggregated teacher autonomy support predicted changes in all three self-processes and engagement; but feedback effects suggested that only student autonomy uniquely predicted changes in the autonomy support teachers subsequently provided. The three components of teacher autonomy support showed somewhat differentiated feedforward and feedback effects depending on the individual student outcome. Finally, person-centered analyses suggested that the effects of the components of autonomy support were cumulative. Together, such feedforward and feedback effects could create virtuous and vicious cycles that may contribute to the generation and maintenance of differentially motivationally supportive teacher-student transactions.

The aim of this study was to determine whether adolescents’ emotional problems, coping flexibility, age, and stress appraisals account for ways of coping, which include engagement and disengagement coping, with academic-, parent-, and peer-related stressful events. Stress appraisals were defined as perceived threats to the psychological needs of relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Models were fit at a higher order level, indicated by adolescents’ appraisals and intended ways of coping with stress in three domains (i.e., academic, parent, and peer) and tested at the lower level within each domain. Adolescents (N = 410; age 10–15; Mage = 12.5; 50% girls) reported their emotional problems (combined depressive and anxiety symptoms) and coping flexibility six months prior to completing an analogue task. The task involved viewing six short film clips portraying stressful events (e.g., obtaining a worse than expected exam grade or arguing with a parent) and reporting three stress appraisals and eight ways of coping after each stressor. The ways of coping were analyzed as four composite scores reflecting engagement coping (active coping, self-reliance) or disengagement coping (withdrawal coping, helplessness). In structural equation models, adolescents who appraised more threat reported more withdrawal coping and helplessness but also more active coping and self-reliance. Adolescents with more emotional problems appraised more threat and anticipated using less constructive ways of coping, whereas adolescents higher in coping flexibility intended to use more constructive ways of coping, with these associations sufficiently modeled at the general (across stress domains) level. Improvement in the model fit was found when appraised threat–coping associations were modeled at the lower (specific stressor domain) level, suggesting differences by stressor domain. Age was associated with more self-reliance and helplessness, with self-reliance being specific to parent stressors and helplessness specific to peer stressors.

Students’ achievement-related self-beliefs, as manifest in values, goal orientations, perceived efficacy, mindsets, and a sense of autonomy and self-determination, have been the centerpiece of motivation theories that describe learning and development. The premise of the current special issue is that these intrapersonal beliefs tell us only half the story. We argue that what is missing from much of the current work on motivation is recognition of the rich and nuanced characteristics of students’ interpersonal relationships, learning contexts, and cultures and their attendant social processes, all of which can influence an individual student’s motivation and engagement. We believe that unless the processes that explain how these influences take place are explicitly acknowledged and studied in greater depth and frequency, the field of motivation will not move forward in meaningful ways. Toward this end, we have invited authors in this special issue to highlight theoretical frameworks and targeted motivation constructs that inform these issues, describe specific social constructs and processes that might explain contextual influences, and propose new directions for motivation science that will integrate these social perspectives with more traditional intrapersonal models of motivation. Their papers focus on a range of social processes emanating from interpersonal contexts most central to children’s lives, and they focus on ways in which these processes support (or undermine) students’ motivation to learn. Additional topics include discussion of how characteristics of these relationships intersect with and are shaped by the broader social contexts in which they are embedded, such as socially engineered learning structures and culturally based ideologies.

BackgroundScience in the Learning Gardens (henceforth, SciLG) program was designed to address two well-documented, inter-related educational problems: under-representation in science of students from racial and ethnic minority groups and inadequacies of curriculum and pedagogy to address their cultural and motivational needs. Funded by the National Science Foundation, SciLG is a partnership between Portland Public Schools and Portland State University. The sixth- through eighth-grade SciLG curriculum aligns with Next Generation Science Standards and uses school gardens as the milieu for learning. This provides the context to investigate factors that support success of a diverse student population using the motivational framework of self-determination theory.ResultsThis study reports results from 113 students and three science teachers from two low-income urban middle schools participating in SciLG. Longitudinal data collected in spring of sixth grade in 2015 and fall of seventh grade in 2015 for the same set of students included a measure of students’ overall motivational experiences in the garden (that combined their reports of relatedness, competence, autonomy, and engagement and teacher-reports of re-engagement in garden-based learning activities) to predict four science outcomes: engagement, learning, science grades, and science identity. Findings suggest that garden-based activities show promise for supporting students’ engagement and learning in science classes and in fostering students’ interest in pursuing science long-term.ConclusionsAs concern for social justice is growing based on the underachievement of students from minority groups, resurgence of the school garden movement over the last several decades provides an opportunity to tip the scales by engaging students in authentic, real-world learning of science and cultivating their interests in science with holistic garden-based learning. This study highlights the role of students’ views of themselves as competent, related, and autonomous in the garden, as well as their engagement and re-engagement in the garden, as potential pathways by which garden-based science activities can shape science motivation, learning, and academic identity in science. Findings also suggest that the motivational model based on self-determination theory can be useful in identifying some of the “active ingredients”—in pedagogy, curriculum, and social relationships—that engage students in these garden-integrated science learning activities.

Guided by the motivational theory of coping (Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck in Ann Rev Psychol 58:119–144. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085705, 2007 ), we investigated children’s anticipated coping with three different stressful events (bullying, parental argument, parent–child verbal conflict), and examined whether their reliance on challenge coping responses versus threat coping responses could be accounted for by emotional reactions (including feelings of sadness, anger and fear), perceived controllability, and orientation or interest in the stressor. In addition, we examined parents’ reports of their children’s temperamental traits as correlates of coping. In random order followed by a positive stimulus, children ( N  = 206, age 8–12 years) watched each of the three stressful events, and reported their emotions, perceived control, orientation and coping after each one. As anticipated, results indicated that controllability was associated with more challenge coping (a composite of adaptive/approach coping responses such as problem solving and support seeking) and less threat coping (a composite of maladaptive/withdrawal coping responses such as helplessness and escape). In general, feelings of sadness were more strongly associated with challenge coping, whereas fear and anger especially related to more threat coping. Greater orientation towards the stressor was particularly predictive of more challenge coping, but also was associated with more threat coping in response to parent stressors. These associations were significant, even after controlling for temperament (negative reactivity, task persistence, withdrawal, and activity), which was generally unrelated to children’s coping. Other combinations of coping responses were also examined.