Motivation

Motivation, the psychological construct ‘invented’ to describe the mechanism by which individuals and groups choose particular behaviour and persist with it, has a history going back millennia in all cultures. Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Indigenous cultures from all continents developed rubrics about positively motivated behavior usually under the mantle of ethical behavior and morality (see, for example, Framarin, 2009; Hsu & Wu, 2015; Pakdel, 2013; Reeve, 2015). Furthermore, the construct of motivation and how to develop positive motivation and behaviour has permeated all areas of human endeavour. Educational psychology, in particular, has a long history of studying the nature and dynamics of motivation for learning (McInerney, 2015). Much of the last 150 years of investigation was dominated by Western theorising and research. And psychologists and educators have learned an enormous amount that has informed educational practice to enhance learning. The last forty or so years has seen a move away from a Western base to theorising and research, a move which now takes culture and human variability as a central tenet for effective research. Rather than looking for regularities and universals with regard to motivation, often powerless in explaining group difference across groups and cultures, and indeed within groups and cultures, more attention is being paid to the culturally specific elements of motivation that may have more efficacy in explaining motivated behaviour in the classroom (King & McInerney, 2016; King, McInerney & Pitliya, 2018). This issue of Educational Psychology is well situated within this current zeitgeist. Cheng (2019) examines the function of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in Taiwan and the United States. While common beliefs based on historical research in the West posit the superiority of intrinsic motivation for enhancing educational achievement, Cheng found that the dynamics of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation work quite differently in the two cultural settings. We should always ask the question why these constructs (or any others for that matter) should work the same way in quite different cultural milieus rather than, as in the past, expecting them to. Questioning the applicability of Western constructs in nonWestern settings should always be paramount. Hoffman and Kurtz-Costes (2019) examine an interesting and culturally relevant intervention to enhance the motivation of American Indian children to study science. This research is important because it not only positions an Indigenous group as the focus but utilises a novel methodology that is not constrained by Western protocols. Although the intervention did not appear successful, the robustness of the method and its short duration should be revisited in subsequent research. Manganelli et al. (2019) tackle the relationships between self-determined motivation, self-regulated cognitive strategies and prior achievement in predicting academic performance. Italian students participated. The findings are in line with extant research, autonomous motivation and critical thinking are predictive of academic performance, while students with more controlled motivation have lower academic motivation. As exemplified in this research, the transposition of models and theories from North America and their