The purpose of this review is to document the directions and recent progress in our understanding of the motivational dynamics of school achievement. Based on the accumulating research it is concluded that the quality of student learning as well as the will to continue learning depends closely on an interaction between the kinds of social and academic goals students bring to the classroom, the motivating properties of these goals and prevailing classroom reward structures. Implications for school reform that follow uniquely from a motivational and goal-theory perspective are also explored.

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Self-worth theory suggests that teachers and students often operate at crosspurposes: Teachers encourage achievement through effort, yet many students attempt to avoid the implication that they lack ability by not trying. To test these assertions undergraduates rated their affective reactions to hypothetical test failures under conditions of high or low effort and in the presence or absence of self-serving excuses. Then, in the role of teachers, they administered punishment to hypothetical students under the same failure conditions. Results indicated that inability attributions and negative affect were greatest when failure followed much effort. Conversely, failure reflected less on ability, and shame was correspondingly reduced when students studied little-the same failure condition that subjects, in the role of teachers, punished most severely.

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ments. In this new schema nAch is assigned a subordinate status as one of many antecedents to achievement, with cognitive attributions becoming the major causal determinants of achievement behavior.Following Heider (19S8), Weiner proposes ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty as among the major perceived causes of achievement performance (Weiner, 1972(Weiner, , 1979. There is general consensus that high and low nAch individuals harbor differential explanations about the causes of their successes and failures (Weiner et al., 1971;Weiner, Heckhausen, Meyer, & Cook, 1972;Weiner & Kukla, 1970;Weiner & Potepan, 1970), and it is precisely these differences that are taken as the essence of individual differences in achievement motivation. 'Generally speaking, persons motivated to approach success (high nAch) attribute failure to lack of effort and success to their ability, whereas failure-avoiding (low nAch) persons tend to ascribe failure to lack of ability and success to external factors such as luck. The