Introduction to Motivation at School: Interventions That Work

This article provides an introduction and overview to this special issue of Educational Psychologist, titled Promoting Motivation at School: Interventions That Work. This issue is devoted to the topic of interventions that emphasize different aspects of motivation for enhancing students' academic and social outcomes in school. The interventions range from programs focused on individual students to large-scale school reform. The programs described in this issue emphasize both students' academic motivation and their social motivation and focus on a variety of important achievement outcomes. Authors also discuss the effectiveness of various interventions for ethnic minority children. The importance of attending to social aspects of motivation in these kinds of interventions is a major theme of this special issue. Brief overviews of each article are provided.