Motivation May Live in Classrooms, Not Minds, Landmark Review Argues

For decades, educational psychology has treated motivation as something that lives inside a student’s head: a set of beliefs, goals, values, and needs that individuals carry with them from classroom to classroom. A sweeping open-access essay published in Educational Psychology Review by Daniel T. Hickey of Indiana University and Charmian Lam of the University of Chicago argues that this assumption is overdue for a radical rethink. Drawing on situated cognition, critical theories of power, and two long-running design-based research programs, the authors contend that motivation is primarily an interactional, socially situated phenomenon that emerges through participation in disciplinary activity, rather than a psychological fuel tank that contexts merely fill or drain.

The essay traces the intellectual lineage of mainstream motivation science, beginning with the shift away from B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning toward Albert Bandura’s social learning theory and the cognitive revolution of the 1970s. The frameworks that came to dominate the field, including social cognitive theory, self-determination theory, expectancy-value theory, and achievement goal theory, all grew from this individualist foundation. Hickey and Lam acknowledge that each has progressively incorporated social and cultural considerations. Bandura’s model of triadic reciprocal causation linked personal factors, behavior, and environment; his later concept of collective efficacy described groups’ shared beliefs in their capacity to act. Self-determination theory was extended cross-culturally to distinguish autonomy from individualism, and Jacqueline Eccles’ expectancy-value framework was renamed situated expectancy-value theory to foreground cultural milieu, stereotypes, and socializers’ beliefs.

Yet the authors argue that these extensions stop short of a deeper transformation. In every mainstream theory, the central explanatory constructs remain located within individuals, with context shaping but not constituting efficacy beliefs, needs, values, and goals. Even Bandura’s collective efficacy, they note, was explicitly framed as an aggregation of individual judgments, with Bandura insisting there is no disembodied group mind. By contrast, the situative synthesis advanced by James Greeno treats organized social activity as the primary unit of analysis, with individual goals and values understood as secondary special cases of practices, tools, and shared purposes that reside in cultural and material contexts beyond any single participant.

This position has a contentious history. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and colleagues influentially charged that situative theorists denied knowledge transfer and the value of abstraction. Greeno responded that these were imputed claims answering the wrong questions, and maintained that the situative perspective offers a broader framework that can include, but also go beyond, individual cognitive functioning. Hickey and Lam embrace Greeno’s framing but reframe the debate in interventionist terms: rather than arguing about the metaphysical nature of motivation, they ask what new insights about educational practice become visible if social and cultural activity is treated as the primary unit of analysis.

At the heart of the essay are two frameworks developed by the late learning scientist Randi Engle, who died in 2012. Productive disciplinary engagement, introduced with Frank Conant in 2002 from video analysis of fifth-grade science classrooms, characterizes engagement as socially rich intellectual discourse in which students build on one another’s ideas while remaining accountable to disciplinary norms. Its four guiding principles call for problematizing content from each student’s viewpoint, granting students authority to address those problems, holding them accountable to peers and disciplinary norms, and providing appropriate resources. Engle’s 2012 retrospective found that studies embodying these principles most strongly also showed the strongest outcomes in productivity, disciplinarity, and engagement.

Engle’s second framework, expansive framing, addresses learning transfer, the perennial puzzle of why knowledge so often fails to travel beyond the classroom. Rejecting the metaphor of knowledge as a file moved between folders, Engle argued that transfer depends on how teachers and learners frame the boundaries of participation. When students are positioned as authors whose ideas matter beyond the immediate lesson, they perceive more opportunities to apply what they know in future settings. An experimental tutoring study on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems found far stronger transfer when learners were positioned as accountable authors rather than spokespersons for instructional materials. Hickey and Lam’s systematic review identified 83 peer-reviewed publications engaging substantively with expansive framing, though only ten included comparison groups and just two randomly assigned participants.

The essay’s most provocative move is to map expansive framing’s five explanatory mechanisms onto mainstream motivation theories, an exercise the authors believe is the first of its kind. The mechanisms, future use, ongoing relevance, transfer-in, authoring content, and authorship generalizing, correspond to constructs that motivation researchers already study. Positioning students as authors may support competence and agency, echoing writing self-efficacy research; helping learners see how assignments connect across time and contexts parallels the utility value interventions shown by Hulleman and Harackiewicz to boost interest and performance in science classes. The authors suggest that a situative perspective could even reconcile differences among mainstream theories by treating their constructs as special cases of socially organized activity.

Two design-based research programs illustrate the approach in practice. The first, participatory learning and assessment, embeds Engle’s principles in a multi-level assessment framework spanning informal discourse, ungraded self-assessments, and formal exams, treating distal achievement tests as what Hickey and Zuiker once called peculiar but necessary knowledge rituals. A newer principle, developed with Agarwal and Sengupta-Irving’s equity-oriented critique, invites minoritized learners to engage with disciplinary uncertainties that surface sociopolitical dimensions of content, positioning them as uniquely experienced authors without requiring them to speak for their identity communities. The second program, Charmian Lam’s dissertation research on writing-intensive first-year seminars, found that campus and classroom belonging both increased significantly over an academic year among 251 students identifying as racial or ethnic minorities, first-generation, or LGBTQ+, with the largest gains reported by LGBTQ+ students.

The authors are candid about the methodological costs of their position. Situative research is complex, and Susan Nolen and colleagues have long warned that the difficulty and time required to do it well may discourage wide participation. The very complexity that makes design-based research compatible with situative theory creates obstacles to generating evidence that will persuade scholars committed to experimental designs. Hickey and Lam point to emerging tools, including critical race mixed methodology, the QuantCrit movement, and design-based implementation research, as ways forward, and they see generative artificial intelligence as both a threat to academic integrity and an opportunity for new design-based studies of motivation.

The essay concludes with a challenge to the field: stop asking how context influences motivation within individuals, and start asking how participation in practices organized through discourse, tools, relationships, and power gives rise to motivational experience in the first place. Familiar constructs such as goals, values, efficacy, autonomy, and belonging are not discarded but repositioned as person-level expressions of broader activity. For educators, the implication is concrete: design classrooms for problematizing, authorship, accountability, and intercontextuality, so that more learners, especially those whose identities have been marginalized, can participate as consequential producers of knowledge rather than passive recipients of it.

Subject of Research: Situated and sociocultural reconceptualization of academic motivation in educational psychology

Article Title: Further Redefining Motivation with Situated Cognition, Power, and Belonging

Article References: Hickey, D. T., & Lam, C. (2026). Further Redefining Motivation with Situated Cognition, Power, and Belonging. Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), Article 131. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10219-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10648-026-10219-3

Keywords: motivation, situated cognition, educational psychology, productive disciplinary engagement, expansive framing, learning transfer, belonging, culturally sustaining pedagogy, design-based research, self-determination theory, equity, learning sciences