Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (2020) 101865

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Contemporary Educational Psychology

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Theories of motivation: Integration and ways forward☆ T

a,⁎ b a
John Hattie , Flaviu A. Hodis , Sean H.K. Kang
a
University of Melbourne, Australia
b
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Motivation is fundamental to human agency and volitional behavior, and several influential theories have been
Motivation proposed to explain why individuals choose or persist in a course of action (over others). New terms and con-
cepts have proliferated as the theoretical models aim to be comprehensive, at the expense of parsimony. The
theoretical models covered in this special issue each have their unique aspects and contributions, but four major
dimensions cut across them: person factors comprising self (expectations, self-efficacy), social (modeling,
comparisons), and cognitive aspects (self-regulation); task values; goals; and perceived costs and benefits.
Motivation is determined by a complex interplay of internal and external factors, and we suggest that a greater
focus on individuals’ motivation profiles, construal of situations, and metacognitive monitoring and control of
goal pursuit might shed more light on the moment-by-moment decisions people make in daily life. Future re-
search could be targeted at evaluating competing models (or perhaps more parsimonious ones) and enhancing
interventions to address students who are unmotivated to excel in school.

1. Introduction
Motivation is among our most studied and contested notions, and
these five articles show the richness, diversity, and depth of con-
temporary thinking about the topic. The models have much in common
and we call not for new models, but for greater evaluations of com-
peting models leading to more parsimonious theories of motivation, for
more attention to the mechanisms of motivation, greater specificity
about the contribution of contextual and situational influences, and ask
for the development of motivational profiles that are core to shaping
motivation effects. Such theories should aim at providing greater pre-
diction or explanation of major education questions such as the relation
to achievement, consider the role of social goals in schools, explain
better why many students are less motivated to excel in school, and
provide profiles as to why students chose the directions they travel.
We question the extensive inclusivity of the current use of the term
motivation, which leads to debates about the clarity and sometimes
overlaps in the terminology. We identify four major aspects of moti-
vation (self, task, goals, and costs and benefits), and welcome the search
for the mechanisms, contextual and situational influences of motiva-
tion. We note the far lower than expected correlations between many
models of motivation and school achievement, ask for deeper in-
vestigation of the metacognitive components of motivation, and call for
including an aspect of motivation for social goals into the models.
We do not have or need a motivation for everything we do, but there
are particular classes of actions when we ask about why we choose to
engage, act, and invest in actions. When we ask a person for their
motivation for engaging in or having engaged in an action, we assume
that they had a case, a justification, a reason, or incentive for pursuing
that action. Often times we hold this case up to evaluation (is it justi-
fied, right, wrong, etc.), most times we ask for a justification and do not
settle for an explanation, and most often we ask more in terms of the
end or goal of the behavior. So often the justification is emotionally
charged, and queries less about ‘why’ (as that assumes a static person)
and more about why we did this rather than that (the direction we
chose to travel).
Twenty years ago, Murphy and Alexander (2000) reported 20 terms
referring to motivation: four relating to goals (orientation, mastery,
performance, work avoidance), two to interest (individual and situa-
tional), four to self-schema (agency, attribution, self-competence, and
self-efficacy), and the remaining to the processes in the direction, vigor,
and persistence of behavior (e.g., intrinsic, extrinsic). In the past two
decades, the terms have increased even more, further underlining
Murphy and Alexander (2000) claims that the terms are generally too
broad, open to misinterpretation, and this contributes to potential
confusion (see also Conradi, Jang, & McKenna, 2014). So what does

This paper prepared under a grant from the Science of Learning Research Center, a Special Research Institute of the Australian Research Council. Project Number
☆

SR120300015.
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: jhattie@unimelb.edu.au (J. Hattie).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101865

Available online 20 May 2020

0361-476X/ Crown Copyright © 2020 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
J. Hattie, et al.
motivation mean to the authors in this special issue?
None of the authors of these papers are specific about what they
mean by the term “motivation” or demarcate the instances when mo-
tivations are sought or queried, or not. Instead, they prefer to elaborate
on the various types, effects, and costs. The clearest is Graham (2020)
who claims motivation “is the study of why individuals behave as they
do” (101861) although we would extend this to why they do this rather
than that. All the authors quickly move to the details of their particular
models; these models are very inclusive and they all argue that there
are multiple ways to become motivated.
One of the concerns is that, over the years the models have become
more inclusive than parsimonious. For instance, Graham (2020) has
over 35 terms in her model and Urdan and Kaplan (2020) have moved
far beyond learning and performance goals to now capture avoidance
and approach, and include many moderators such as beliefs, contextual
factors, and definitions of success: “how the student was likely to feel
about successful and unsuccessful outcomes on the task, what their
behavioral response to success or failure was likely to be, and how the
student’s identity, partially influenced by their cultural background,
may be affecting their perceptions of the context, the task, themselves
in that situation, and their achievement goals.” (10186).
Turning next to how each theory does specify what motivation is, as
noted above Graham (2020) focuses on the attributions, or ‘why’
questions. She starts with an outcome (success, failure, happy, sad) and
then the individual searches for reasons for this outcome. These reasons
relate to ability, effort, or affiliation which lead to three causal di-
mensions: locus (within or outside the person), stability (enduring over
time or not), and controllability (subject to volitional influence). Thus,
there is an 8-cell explanation: 2 locus, 2 stability, and 2 controllability
dimensions. What then matters, is how individuals react to the con-
sequences of these causal ascriptions and this leads to a rich discussion
about self-esteem, self-handicapping, and being a member of a stig-
matized group. A major value of this attribution model is that there are
direct messages about attribution retraining, with the important proviso
that such programs must not only focus on the causal attributions but
also the friendship networks and peer influences.
Eccles and Wigfield (2020) regard motivations to be a function of
“the momentarily ascendant self-concepts of ability and various task
and personal values, goals, and identity fragments [which] depend on
the specific current situation in which both conscious and non-con-
scious choices are being made” (101859). They note that these deci-
sions are weighed by perceived costs (effort, opportunity, emotional)
and benefits to the individual. They elaborate on the expectations for
success such as confidence and personal efficacy and at least three types
of task values (intrinsic, utility, and attainment).
Schunk and DiBenedetto (2020) regard motivation as a function of
agency, monitoring progress towards a goal, and the individual’s sense
of perceived capabilities to learn and perform actions. These derive
from modeling and social comparisons, self-efficacy, goals, outcome
expectations, values, attributions, and self-regulation. Their model is
very goal oriented hence the importance of expectations, anticipated
outcomes, and the important distinction between mastery and coping
models, but the main emphasis is on self-efficacy. Motivation is a
function of the feedback learners receive as they work on a task; spe-
cifically as they make progress (or not). “As learners work on tasks they
acquire self-feedback from and others on their learning goal progress.
The belief that they are making progress substantiates their self-effi-
cacy, which enhances motivational outcomes and motivation (101832).
In turn, increased self-efficacy promotes continued motivation and
achievement. This sense of confidence influences the choice of activ-
ities, effort, persistence, achievement, and self-regulation, and in turn is
affected by the outcomes of one’s achievement efforts.”
Urdan and Kaplan (2020) place much emphasis on the socio-cog-
nitive meanings about the multiple perceptions, beliefs and goals that
underpin the choices or motivations students make to engage or not in
tasks. They trace the evolution of these multiple goals (such as
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Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (2020) 101865
achievement, task, learning, performance, appearance, avoidance and
approach), and how these goals are impacted by the personality, con-
text, and strivings. They are particularly interested in how school and
classroom goal structures influence student motivation and behavior,
how to better understand and influence goal orientations in schools
especially to make schools more democratic, worry about the over re-
liance on self-report measures, are fascinated by how we can have
multiple and sometimes competing goals, and recommend further re-
search on identifying the various moderators that can affect decisions
about goals.
Ryan and Deci (2020) distinguish between intrinsic motivation
(activities done for their own sake) and extrinsic motivation concerns
(activities done for instrumental reasons). They specify six forms of
extrinsic motivation that systematically vary in their degree of au-
tonomy (see below), or the extent to which the motivation has been
fully internalized and is volitional (external, introjected, identified,
integrated, intrinsic, and amotivation). Can a student be “motivated” if
they do as they are told? Is compliance a motivation? The suggestion is
not we pick one or the other, but that most intentional behaviors are
multiply motivated. The basic claim is that individuals are motivated
towards a sense of competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
1.1. Bringing the models together
When we merge the various models, four major parts become ap-
parent: self, task, goals, and costs and benefits (Fig. 1). This differs from
the earlier synthesis by Murphy and Alexander (2000) in that they too
had four but different higher order notions: self-schema, goals, inter-
ests, and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. They had task attributes under
the ‘Interest’ label, and we have placed their intrinsic/extrinsic factor as
part of self-regulation, and have added dimensions relating to the costs
and benefits. Their person terms included self, agency, attribution, self-
competence, and self-efficacy and these correspond with self, social,
and cognitive aspects of the person related influences. Conradi et al.
(2014) were somewhat similar in using goals, beliefs (about self, about
the content), and predispositions (attitudes and interests). In some
senses, the work of the past two decades has been improving the
models, sorting out the jingle jangle of terms and correlates, and it is
noted that all five models in this special issue have been developed over
a very long time (the past four to five decades) attesting to their value
and level of interest.
The person dimension represented in Fig. 1 includes self aspects,
such as expectations of success, self-efficacy/ confidence, or the per-
son’s perceived capabilities to learn and perform actions at designed
levels. “Learners who feel efficacious about learning are apt to engage
in cognitive and behavioral activities that improve their learning such
as setting goals, using effective learning strategies, monitoring and
evaluating their goal progress, and creating effective physical and social
environments for learning (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020, 101832).
Eccles and Wigfield (2020) have a similar notion, which they term
expectancies for success, which is the individuals’ beliefs about how
well they will do on an upcoming task. They show how interventions
designed to increase individuals’ confidence in their ability to master
achievement-related tasks, particularly when coupled with high quality
instruction, lead to increases in engagement and performance. Finally,
Ryan and Deci’s (2017, 2020) need for competence belongs to the same
conceptual family as expectancy of success and self-efficacy (Feldon,
Callan, Juth, & Jeong, 2019).
The social aspects of motivation include modeling, social compar-
isons, and relatedness. “People attempt to learn those modeled actions
that they believe will lead to desirable outcomes and help them attain
their goals. People form expectations about the anticipated outcomes of
different actions (outcome expectations—discussed later) based on
their observations of models and other experiences” (Schunk &
DiBenedetto, 2020, 101832). Ryan and Deci (2020) see relatedness in
terms of a need to feel related or connected to others and loved and
J. Hattie, et al.
Fig. 1. Major dimensions of the five models of motivation.
valued by them.
The cognitive attributes of motivation include self-regulation, or
“self-generated thoughts, affects, and behaviors that are systematically
oriented toward attainment of one’s goals. Self-regulated learning occurs
when those goals involve learning” (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020,
101832). This, they claim, relates to an underlying premise of social
cognitive theory that "individuals desire to experience a sense of agency,
or the belief that they can exert a large degree of influence over im-
portant events in their lives.” Ryan and Deci (2020) specify six types of
regulation, arranged along a continuum reflecting the degree to which
the regulation of the behavior is autonomous. These include (1) intrinsic
motivation which pertains to activities done for their own sake or be-
cause individuals find them engaging or even fun; and five forms of
extrinsic motivation which concerns behavior done for instrumental
reasons (i.e., to obtain some aim separable from behavior itself). They
are (2) external regulation (driven by external rewards and punish-
ments); (3) introjected regulation (extrinsic motivation that has been
partially internalized); (4) identified regulation (the person has con-
sciously identified with the value of an activity, and thus experiences
volition and self-endorsement when engaging in it); (5) integrated
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Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (2020) 101865
regulation (the person not only recognizes and identifies with the value
or worthwhileness of the activity, but also sees it as congruent with
other core interests and values); and (6) amotivation (lacking in-
tentionality, which can result from either lack of competence to act, or
lack of value or interest).
The task can be valued or perceived to be important or useful to
engage and learn, particularly when people perceive their goals to be
aligned with the outcomes that are important to them (Schunk &
DiBenedetto, 2020). Eccles and Wigfield (2020) are more specific ar-
guing tasks can have intrinsic value (the value is the anticipated en-
joyment one expects to gain from doing the task); utility value (in
terms of how well a particular task fits into an individual's present or
future plans; and/or attainment value (the relative personal/identity-
based importance attached by individuals to engaging in various tasks
or activities).
Goals and goal strivings have long been an attribute of most mo-
tivation models, and this seems agreed by all five papers. As Schunk and
DiBenedetto noted, “goals help to focus and sustain individuals’ efforts
directed toward task success. The belief that learners are making goal
progress can sustain self-efficacy and motivation, … (and a)
J. Hattie, et al.
discrepancy between the goal and perceived progress can motivate
learners to expend the necessary effort and persist” (101859). Urdan
and Kaplan (2020) prefer outcome expectations or the beliefs about the
likely consequences of given actions based on prior personal and vi-
carious experiences. These goals could be performance or mastery, and
the investment could be via an approach or avoidance process.
Eccles and Wigfield (2020) touch on a critical component of moti-
vation – the costs and benefits of doing this rather than that, which
can markedly affect the motivation to engage or not in a task, or to
pursue a goal. The costs include (1) effort costs (the perception of how
much effort would need to be exerted to complete a task and whether it
is worth doing so); (2) opportunity costs (the extent to which doing one
task takes away from one’s ability or time to do other valued tasks); and
emotional costs (the emotional or psychological costs of pursuing the
task, particularly anticipated anxiety and the emotional and social costs
of failure). The benefits include (1) external rewards, (2) intrinsic sa-
tisfaction, (3) identification of core values; (4) compliance (and thus
often reduced or absent negative consequences), (5) autonomy or
agency, and (6) a sense of competence.
1.2. The mechanisms of motivation
An individual may invoke expectations of success, have high con-
fidence, want to model socially desirable others, find the task of value
and aim for mastery goals, and see many benefits in engaging in the
task. Or they have no confidence, model on others not engaged, see no
value other than completing the task for compliance reasons, and per-
ceive high costs to invest and persist in a task. But what are the mo-
ment-by-moment decisions or lack of decisions this individual makes –
that is, their motivation for doing this rather than that throughout the
choosing, the investing, and the completion (or not) of a task. A pos-
sible answer to this question is suggested by Higgins’ (2012b) conten-
tion that effectiveness strivings ‘work together’ to determine motivation
effects. The strength of the rope is not in one fiber throughout, but the
overlapping of many different fibers (Wittgenstein, 1953).
It is likely the interplay of self or internal processes and external
influences (our perception of others, teachers, bosses) that determine
our motivations. Specifically, when an individual (e.g., an adolescent)
has a motivation profile characterized by one or more strong motiva-
tion orientations, this configuration indicates that the given orienta-
tions are highly accessible in his or her mind; thus, they are likely to be
activated often and to influence self-regulation across contexts
(Higgins, 2012a, 2012b). In turn, this chronic accessibility acts as an
intensifier of “the signaling strength of motivationally salient in-
formation [i.e., information that is related to these easily accessible
motivational orientations], such that this information exerts a dis-
proportionately strong influence over adolescents’ choices, action, and
regulatory capacity” (Braver et al., 2014, p. 448).
We note that Nolen (2020) emphasizes the ‘person in context’ set of
claims and outlines the major distinctions between the five more-psy-
chological theories and the more situative-focused approach. Following
in these conceptual footsteps, we argue that chronic promotion, pre-
vention, locomotion, and assessment strengths (summarized by Higgins
(2012b) and Hodis (2018a) are key pillars of the organization of an
individual’s motivation profile), they interact with one another and
with an individual’s construal of the relevant psychological character-
istics of contexts and situations to influence his or her behavioral,
cognitive, and emotional manifestations. Promotion reflects people’s
motivation to attain ideal aspirations, gains, advancement, and positive
outcomes. In contrast, prevention encompasses individuals’ motivation
to avoid losses and negative outcomes, maintain neutral/satisfactory
states, and fulfill responsibilities and duties (Higgins, 2012b). Loco-
motion is a motivation orientation that is associated with desire for
change and preference to engage in tasks/activities that are likely to
facilitate smooth and uninterrupted transitions between stages and
states (Kruglanski et al., 2000). Assessment reflects people’s motivation
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Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (2020) 101865
to engage in exhaustive comparative judgments and critical evaluations
to establish the relative worth of alternatives (Kruglanski et al., 2000).
Importantly, an individual’s organization of promotion, prevention,
locomotion, and assessment: (i) shapes her cognitive and affective
processes (via differential accessibility of mental structures); (ii) influ-
ences which of the psychological characteristics of a context/situation
the individual perceives as relevant; (iii) determines how she processes,
construes, and remembers relevant psychological features (Higgins,
2014); and (iv) influences how the resultant “encodings activate and
interact with other cognitions and affects” (Mischel & Shoda, 1995, p.
252) linked to the chronically accessible motivational orientations.
In a similar conceptual vein with the authors of the different articles
in this special issue, we believe that the contribution of contextual and
situational influences is core to shaping motivation effects, and these
can be evaluated by means of a three-step process. The first step in-
volves identifying the psychological characteristics of the situation or
context that the person is likely to perceive as relevant and evaluating
their attendant affordances and constraints (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). A
potentially productive approach to this identification process could use,
for example, the taxonomy of dimensions of situational characteristics
proposed by Rauthmann et al. (2014; i.e., the situational eight DIAM-
ONDS: Duty, Intellect, Adversity, Mating, pOsitivity, Negativity, De-
ception, and Sociality). Importantly, the likely pattern of accessibility of
a person’s motivational orientations, which is mapped by the organi-
zation of her motivation profile, influences this individual’s perceptions
of context-related opportunities and costs. As a result, information
conveyed by her motivation profile helps predict what she perceives as
relevant affordances and constraints in a given context.
The second step of this process involves (a) mapping how an in-
dividual construes the relevant psychological features of a context/si-
tuation; and (b) evaluating the extent to which this process is likely to
effect changes in the individual’s motivation profile (e.g., by affecting
the magnitude of some motivation orientations and/or the pattern of
interrelationships among them). This step enables gauging to what
extent (if at all) contextual influences are likely to alter the way in
which the strength of one (or more) motivation orientations either
compensates for the weakness in the others or attenuates their influ-
ences on motivational manifestations (Cornwell, Franks, & Higgins,
2019). The final step of this process involves using extant theoretical
and empirical knowledge to identify the array of key behavioral, cog-
nitive, and emotional manifestations that are most likely to be asso-
ciated with the context-attuned configuration of the motivation profile.
All five papers in this special issue speak much to this final step but less
to the former steps.
This three-step process has, at its conceptual core, the assumption
that contextual/situational factors exert their influences on motivation
effects by means of changing the organization of the motivation system;
that is, by changing the configuration of an individual’s motivation
profile (see Nolen, 2020). Mapping how inter-individual differences in
motivation orientations (i.e., promotion, prevention, locomotion, and
assessment) interact with one another and with contextual factors en-
hances understanding of key antecedents of motivation effects. In turn,
this opens the door for consequential future research. Such research
may get closer to the moment by moment decisions people make to
become, stay, increase, or reduce their motivation to invest in the tasks,
to strive for autonomy, relatedness and competence, and thence attain
their intended goals.
1.3. Parsimonious or overly inclusive: the ongoing motivations?
Perhaps we are over explaining motivation, and the request over the
next decade could be for more parsimonious models that explain more
by including less (cf., Anderman, 2020). Perhaps if there was a focus
less on why we engage or invest in an activity but more on why we do
this rather than that there could be more specificity. Specifying when
motivation (or calling for motives) is worthwhile could help put these
J. Hattie, et al.
models into perspective: for example, students often do tasks for com-
pliance reasons, and thus this aspect of amotivation could become a
comparison point. Anderman (2020) rephrases motivation relative to
the question each theory optimizes, and also asks whether we need all
these theories and empirical constructs. We also see merit in devising
studies to compare and contrast the predictions and explanations from
the various models leading to more parsimony in the field.
Further, specifying the attributes of why people continue to invest
or strive to undertake a task could add a richness. Higgins (2012b)
proposed that being motivated involves strivings to attain value, con-
trol, and truth effectiveness. In this theorizing, strivings for value ef-
fectiveness entails wanting to obtain positive outcomes and avoid ne-
gative ones; strivings for control effectiveness reflect individuals’ desire
to be successful in managing how they pursue goals; strivings for truth
effectiveness encompass people’s desire to understand themselves or
their circumstances and to resolve confusion, uncertainty, and ambi-
guity (Higgins, 2012b; Hodis, 2018a; Hodis, 2018b). Typically, re-
searchers measure strivings for value effectiveness by means of pro-
motion and prevention orientations whereas strivings for control and
truth effectiveness are gauged by locomotion and assessment, respec-
tively (for details, see Higgins, 2012b; Hodis, 2018a; Hodis, 2018b).
Higgins’ framework leads to a broader than the usual con-
ceptualization of “avoidance” notion, which is more negative than
neutral: that is, when the behavior is directed in a negative or un-
desirable event or possibility. As in Urdan and Kaplan (2020), we invite
researchers to be more open to exploring these notions of avoidance
and approach, or the associated notions of promotion and prevention:
“Too often scholars who argue for the desirability of performance-ap-
proach goals only argue for the potential value of “normative goals” –
those objectives that do not involve self-presentation and self-worth
concerns – and do not consider “appearance goals” that do involve self-
presentation and self-worth concerns to be as desirable … possibly …
an integration of the broader and specific conceptualizations may
suggest that there is more commonality than disagreement between
scholars on the two sides” (101862).
Given these considerations, it is likely that investigating motivation
systems spanned by people’s strivings for value, control, and truth ef-
fectiveness and the attendant motivation profiles facilitates an en-
hanced understanding of mechanisms that account for how chronic
motivation tendencies (i.e., promotion, prevention, locomotion, and
assessment; or avoidance and approach) interact with contextual/si-
tuational/task elements to shape the effects of motivation. This is why,
in line with Pintrich (2003), we consider that examinations of these
types of “self-system models also will help to bridge the current gap
between social-cognitive and situated models of motivation that dif-
ferentially emphasize the individual or the context” (p. 680). This
standpoint is consistent with suggestions made by Urdan and Kaplan
(2020) and is in line with recommendations for closer examinations of
contextual/situational influences made by the authors of all the articles
in this special issue.
Similarly, people’s attributions for success and failure have sig-
nificant consequences for important outcomes (Graham, 2020). Many
attributions outlined in Graham’s (2020) model may be affected by
moderators – and space probably prevented more discussion of these. It
may be that “the very same self-variables (for example, the same self-
efficacy, expectancy, or the same attribution) can take on entirely dif-
ferent meanings, operate in entirely different ways, and have entirely
different impact” in distinct organizations of the motivation system
(i.e., in different motivation profiles; Dweck, Higgins, & Grant-Pillow,
2003, p. 250; for research on motivation profiles defined by promotion,
prevention, locomotion, and assessment see Hodis, Hattie, & Hodis,
2017).
That is, the same causal attribution for success or failure is likely to
have different implications for individuals having distinct motivation
profiles. To illustrate this aspect, we use the hypothetical scenario of
some students in a chemistry course attributing success at a multiple-
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Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (2020) 101865
choice mid-term examination to luck (an external, uncontrollable, and
unstable attribution). This attribution is likely to be adaptive for stu-
dents having motivation profiles that include a strong prevention or-
ientation. Specifically, for these individuals, the given attribution
strengthens the vigilant outlook that is at the core of prevention suc-
cess. Hence, once these students have made this attribution, they are
likely to increase their effort in the given course. In contrast, the same
attribution is generally maladaptive for students having a strong pro-
motion orientation because it is likely to thwart the eagerness that
supports promotion success and, thus, to reduce both task engagement
and the perceived value of outcomes associated with the task.
Moreover, as individuals’ propensity to act in concordance with new
information depends on how real (‘true’) they believe it to be (Higgins,
2012b), it follows that knowledge of motivation profiles can facilitate
in-depth assessments of the effects of causal attributions on behavioral
intentions, behaviors, and affective manifestations.
In addition, knowledge of motivation profiles can enhance under-
standing of individual differences in key cognitive processes underlying
the formation of causal attributions. Specifically, when engaging in
decision making and causal attributions, individuals having a strong
promotion orientation are motivated to try to take into account all
available information. As a result, they are likely to generate and
consider a high number of competing hypotheses to increase their
chances of identifying correctly causal mechanisms at play (Liberman,
Molden, Idson, & Higgins, 2001). In contrast, individuals characterized
by a strong prevention orientation are vigilant against making mistakes.
As a consequence, they attempt to avoid making faulty causal attribu-
tions and, thus, generate and consider few hypotheses during attribu-
tion formation (Liberman et al., 2001). Taken together, these aspects
suggest that knowledge of the motivation profiles encompassing stu-
dents’ concomitant strivings for value, control, and truth effectiveness
can enhance understanding of a vexing issue, namely that for different
students distinct motivational manifestations can be triggered/fa-
cilitated by the same educational context (Dweck, 2003).
We consider that an important direction for future motivation re-
search would be to examine our proposition that causal attributions for
success and failure have different implications for people exhibiting
different motivation profiles. This type of research could map whether
(and, if so, to what extent) research on motivation profiles could con-
tribute to theory development or inform policy/practice pertaining to
attributions (Graham, 2020).
1.4. Relation of motivation to achievement
All five papers make prediction claims, particularly about student
motivations toward academic tasks. This topic of motivating students to
engage what we (as adults) consider precious knowledge or curriculum
may be the greatest educational challenge of our times. The Jenkin’s
curve (Jenkins, 2015) is powerful and concerning: 95% of 5 years-old
children want to come to school and are motivated to learn what tea-
chers want them to learn, and this dips to 37% by Grade 9 (and slightly
increases after this). By the end of elementary school, two in three
students do not see their classrooms as motivating and worth coming to
learn – they would rather be elsewhere. There is much debate on how to
motivate students to learn but a mistake is to assume the naughty kids
are the only ones not engaged or motivated. The ambivalent and un-
cooperative students often have similar profiles of low learning gain as
the more obviously disengaged. This makes for too large a cohort of
students not motivated to engage in school work.
There have been 37 meta-analyses relating various aspects of mo-
tivation to achievement (Table 1; see Hattie, 2008; www.
visiblelearningmetax.com). The highest effects come from those with
mastery goals, and those with strategic motivation (knowing when to
be surface, when to be deep, when to approach and when to avoid,
when to master, when to perform) and speaks much to the necessity of
not seeing motivational attributes or goals as singular or fixed over
J. Hattie, et al. Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (2020) 101865

Table 1
Meta-analysis relating to motivation attributes.
Authors Year No studies No. people No. effects r se** Topic

Motivation
Uguroglu & Walberg 1979 40 36,946 232 0.12 0.03 Motivation
Ozen 2017 205 772,903 205 0.27 0.02 Motivation
Bauer, Orvis, Ely, & Surface 2016 136 25,012 136 0.05 0.08* Motivation
Chen, Chen & Zhu 2013 29 283 0.21 0.06* Motivation on physical education
Crede & Phillips 2011 67 19,900 2158 0.12 0.02* Motivation strategies

Engagement
Quin 2017 14 14 0.32 0.06 Engagement
Lei, Cui, & Zhou 2018 69 196,473 163 0.27 0.08* Engagement
Chang, Chien, & Chou 2016 33 33 0.24 0.03 Engagement
Kumar 1991 16 4,518 102 0.48 0.02 Engagement in science
Aker 2016 79 53,971 79 0.18 0.02 Engagement in science
von Stumm & Ackerman 2013 112 22,621 77 0.12 0.11* Investment in learning

Internal attributions
Findley & Cooper 1983 98 15,285 275 0.18 0.02 Internal locus of control
Kalechstein & Nowicki 1997 78 58,142 261 0.11 0.01 Internal locus of control
Cerasoli, Nicklin, & Ford 2014 125 196,778 125 0.23 0.09* Intrinsic motivation
Cogaltay 2017 23 18,918 23 0.02 0.06 Locus of control

Performance or Surface goals

van Yperen, Blaga & Postmes 2014 98 106 0.10 0.09* Performance goals on achievement
Payne, Youngcourt, & Beaubien 2007 44 44 0.01 0.15* Performance goals on achievement
Rolland 2012 10 10 −0.10 0.30* Performance goals on achievement
Purdie & Hattie 1999 101 101 0.05 0.10* Surface approach
Watkins 2001 55 28,053 60 −0.11 0.13* Surface motivation
Purdie & Hattie 1999 48 48 −0.26 0.14* Surface motivation

Approach goals
Hulleman, Schrager, Bodmann & Harackiewicz 2010 243 91,087 243 0.06 0.06* Approach goals on achievement
van Yperen, Blaga, & Postmes 2014 98 103 0.07 0.10* Mastery approach
van Yperen, Blaga, & Postmes 2014 98 106 0.05 0.09* Performance approach

Avoidance goals
van Yperen, Blaga, & Postmes 2014 98 65 −0.06 0.13* Mastery avoidance
Baranik, Stanley, Bynum, & Lance 2010 25 9,014 26 −0.09 0.19* Mastery avoidance
Payne, Youngcourt, & Beaubien 2007 12 12 −0.05 0.28* Avoidance goals
van Yperen, Blaga, & Postmes 2014 98 31 −0.03 0.18* Performance Avoidance

Achieving or Strategic Motivation

Purdie & Hattie 1999 95 95 0.33 0.10* Achieving approach
Purdie & Hattie 1999 18 18 0.09 0.23* Achieving motivation
Watkins 2001 55 60 0.16 0.13* Achieving motivation

Deep or Mastery motivation

Purdie & Hattie 1999 38 38 0.30 0.16* Deep approach
Purdie & Hattie 1999 72 72 0.35 0.12* Deep motivation
Watkins 2001 55 60 0.16 0.13* Deep motivation
Carpenter 2007 48 12,466 48 0.12 0.14* Mastery goals on achievement
van Yperen, Blaga & Postmes 2014 98 103 0.14 0.10* Mastery goals on achievement
Rolland 2012 12 12 0.02 0.28* Mastery goals on achievement

Authors No. metas No studies No. people No. effects r se**

Motivation 5 477 854,761 3014 0.15 0.09

Engagement 6 323 277,583 468 0.13 0.10
Internal attributions 4 324 289,123 684 0.14 0.09
Performance or Surface goals 6 356 28,053 369 −0.05 0.31
Approach goals 3 439 91,087 452 0.06 0.17
Avoidance goals 4 233 9,014 134 −0.06 0.40
Achieving/Strategic Motivation 3 168 173 0.19 0.31
Deep or Mastery motivation 6 323 12,466 333 0.18 0.32

time. None of these correlations inspires high confidence that the re-
lation between motivation and achievement is either well understood
or predicts achievement outcomes to any critical extent. Nolen (2020)
sees this lack of precision in predicting achievement behavior as not a
fatal flaw, but we would argue that we have much to do.
The papers in this Special Issue had some comment on programs to
enhance motivation, and such studies could help to show which models
or parts of the models may have more import. Lazowski and Hulleman
(2016) conducted a meta-analysis of 74 articles, based on 38,777 par-
ticipants and used a variety of outcomes (including motivational out-
comes).
The average effect on enhancing student motivation was 0.49,
which they note is considerably high for educational interventions. The
highest effects came from “transformation experiences” (d = 0.74)
where there is a reframing of the learning experiences as an application
of the content in a way that enhances everyday value. Then self-de-
termination (d = 0.70), interest (d = 0.69), goal setting (d = 0.67),
implicit theories of intelligence (Dweck’s mindset; d = 0.56), attribu-
tion to self skills (d = 0.54). These more successful interventions show
the importance of understanding students’ values and expectancies
(Eccles and Wigfield, 2020), their sense of self-determination (Deci &
Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2017, 2020), and their beliefs about the

6
J. Hattie, et al.
learning skills they need to undertake the learning. The more recent
work on establishing personal bests offers a promising direction as they
serve not only as an initiating effect (i.e., prompts initial engagement)
but also as a contemporaneous effect (predicts behavior at any point of
time), and an escalating effect (as the student learns, personal bests
have an increasing impact on engagement) (Burns, Martin, & Collie,
2019). They tie into goal theory (mastery and attainment), self-reg-
ulation, and growth; which can lead to students seeking further
learning, receiving feedback, and having shorter term gains in attain-
ment.
2. Methodology
We note, that while alluded to in some of these papers, we may need
more attention to the strong metacognitive component to motivation.
Major models of metacognition focus on both monitoring and control
(Nelson & Narens, 1994): applied to motivation, monitoring would
revolve around assessing the quantity (e.g., low vs. high) and quality
(e.g., intrinsic vs. extrinsic) of one’s motivation during goal pursuit;
control would involve using the outputs of monitoring to choose and
implement motivation regulation strategies so as to get closer to one’s
goals (or revising—even abandoning—one’s goals in some cases; Miele
& Scholer, 2018). One’s knowledge and beliefs about the task, the self,
and motivation (e.g., knowledge of various motivation regulation
strategies, etc.) influence monitoring and control of motivation (Miele
& Scholer, 2018).
There are established ways to assess metacognitive monitoring ac-
curacy (e.g., compare an individual’s metacognitive judgment or pre-
diction with his/her objective performance—good correspondence be-
tween the two means good calibration; Keren, 1991). The accuracy of
the monitoring would likely depend on the types of evidence or feed-
back individuals rely on, their beliefs regarding the various lines of
evidence, and how much weight they give to each piece of evidence
(e.g., performance on a Math test, encouragement or discouragement
from a teacher, guidance counsellor, or parent). Although it might be
challenging to evaluate how well people’s (subjective) goal monitoring
match up with their ultimate (objective) goal attainment (depending on
the kinds of goals and behaviors of interest, long-term longitudinal
studies are often necessary), even shorter-term studies that focus on
monitoring judgments without evaluating calibration could shed light
on factors that affect motivation strength and goal adjustment. For in-
stance, obtaining explicit judgments about the subjective (temporal)
distance of achieving a given goal or the perceived likelihood of goal
achievement could reveal potential inflection points in behavior or
motivation (e.g., if the perceived likelihood of achieving a goal falls
below a certain threshold there would likely be a change to one’s goal
or behavior). An additional area of potentially fruitful exploration
would require studies that assess in real time, during learning tasks,
how learners use their on-line thoughts, beliefs, and emotions to make
key decisions pertaining to motivation regulation (for more extensive
discussions regarding the roles of emotions in motivation regulation see
Miele & Scholer, 2018).
Motivation and metacognition are at the heart of our decision-
making. A significant part of our mental life probably consists of the
reciprocal monitoring and setting/adjustment of our goals (which are,
of course, influenced also by our beliefs, values, sense of self, others
around us), and we propose that a greater focus on the metacognitive
aspects of motivation could be useful
3. Conclusions
Motivation remains one of our most studied concepts, theories
abound, and there is much empirical work to buttress each theory. It is
exciting to see such bold ideas, high level conjectures as to causal re-
lations, and this is how our discipline advances. Perhaps it is time to ask
for more research on the competing explanations, and showing how a
7
Contemporary Educational Psychology 61 (2020) 101865
reduced but higher order model can “explain” and predict more about
an individual’s motivations. All articles comment on the restrictions of
the current methods. With the advent of access to ‘big data’, and more
on-line, adaptive and simulated item methods, this is the time for some
grand designs to address competing theories, and to relate the me-
chanisms invoked in the motivation theories to other person or self
models.
The five theories in this special issue have four common attributes:
relating to the person goals and expectations, social, cognitive, and
tasks, and they all emphasize these to various degrees. We noted that
more “oil” may be needed to show the smooth relations between parts
of the models, and despite the models explaining “so much” there is
much room for improvement in what these models predict, and perhaps
more parsimony. At the school level, motivations are not as predictive
maybe because much of school is compliance related, based on ‘doing’
and completing tasks (to any level of investment). More attention may
need to be given to motivation for social goals (which may be parti-
cularly important in non-Western cultures). Such goals relate to social
approval, social solidarity, social responsibility, belongingness, pro-
social, social affiliation, social attractiveness, social power, social as-
sistance, and social status goals; in classrooms (McCollum, 2005;
Watkins & Hattie, 2012).
If the health of a profession is based on the richness of motivation
theories, these five articles demonstrate that we are in excellent con-
dition.
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