How Does Motivation Develop and Why Does It Change? Reframing Motivation Research

In this article, we argue for a change in how researchers study motivation to learn. We believe that research can provide better explanations of the origins and outcomes of behavior, and thus be more useful, if we focus on howmotivation develops andwhy it changes.We suggest refram-ing motivation research in education by extending the current focus on beliefs to studying the transactions among persons engaged in specific classroom activities over time. We present one approach from developmental psychology—Rogoff’s three planes—that attempts to account for this transaction. We then present examples of current motivation research to illustrate how this approach has been applied. We believe that using this framework can produce new results that are meaningful for both researchers and practitioners who want to understand and foster motivation in education. Consider the motivation of two students in the same sixth-grade mathematics classroom. One is a low-achieving girl and the other a high-achieving boy. When asked to report on their achievement goals on a survey, the girl reported high personalmastery1 and lowperformance-approach goals.