Chapter 12: Seeing the Forest Beyond the Trees: Adopting a Multilevel Perspective on Student Achievement Motivation

What makes students motivated and successful in school? Thousands of studies have addressed this question. A multitude of correlates of important motivational and achievement outcomes have been identified. It is easy to become bewildered by the forest of constructs and theories that have proliferated considering the wide range of theoretical perspectives and empirical findings about student achievement motivation. In order to give a semblance of order to all these relevant ideas and phenomena, we utilize Sheldon’s (2004) multilevel personality in context (MPIC) model as a useful organizing framework for looking at student achievement-related behaviors from a more holistic standpoint.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the MPIC model as a heuristic framework for understanding achievement motivation and achievement-related behaviors in school. We particularly focus on social-cognitive theories of achievement motivation, which have dominated motivational theorizing in educational psychology (Pintrich, 2003). First, we give an overview of the MPIC model and elucidate how it can shed light on students’ achievement-related behaviors. Next, we locate contemporary theories of student motivation along the levels of analysis in the MPIC model. We highlight how an integrative perspective offered by the MPIC model can resolve certain questions in the motivation and engagement literature. We then propose suggestions on how to carry out studies using the MPIC model in educational psychology. It is our contention that there is a need to balance our goals of understanding specific processes with the more global goal of creating a comprehensive motivational science. We believe the MPIC model to be eminently suited for helping motivational science achieve these goals.