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The role of social, cultural, and personal factors in moderating achievement attributions and evaluation anxiety as they affect math performance in school was studied for 397 Anglo, black, and Hispanic students in grades four to eight. Cross-group analyses indicated that motivation contributed to low academic achievement in all groups, but different factors were important for different groups; causal attributions were more predictive of math scores for the black and Anglo children, while anxiety scores were more predictive for the Hispanic children. Across ethnic groups, those children who do experience a debilitating constellation of motivational variables are from families who are upwardly mobile and on the borderline of socioeconomic or cultural strata. The findings suggest the importance of developing instructional activities to facilitate positive motivation that are in accord with the motivational needs of the particular child as well as further research to pinpoint the motivational needs of different groups of children.There is a long and continuing history of interest in the sociocultural origins of achievement-related motives (