Academic Motivation and the Culture of School in Childhood and Adolescence

Schools, as one form of complex organizational settings, are regulated by often invisible expectations, understandings, and values that comprise the culture of the institutions. This volume will extend the already substantial understanding of academic motivation by moving beyond important and well studied relational and personal variables to an examination of school culture and motivation. Prevailing normative expectations for students are constructed and guided by cultural values and shape student motivation and achievement in powerful ways. This value system, however, is often left invisible in motivational analyses. Chapters in this volume challenge the prevailing discourse that equates ethnic minority with culture and places the cultural assumptions guiding schools outside the sphere of cultural inquiry.

Decades of reserach indicate the important connections among academic motivation and achievement, social relationships, and school culture. However, much of this research has been conducted in homogenous American schools serving middle class, average achieving, Anglo-student populations. This edited volume will argue that school culture is a reflection of the society in which the school is embedded and comprises various aspects, including induvidualism, competition, cultural stereotypes, and extrinsically guided values and rewards. They address three specific conceptual questions: How do differences in academic motivation for diverse groups of students change over time? How do students'' social cognitions influence their motivational processes and outcomes in school? And what has been done to enhance academic motivation? To answer this last question, the contributers describe empirically validated intervention programs for improving academic motivation in students from elementary school through college.