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In this chapter we review the research on the development of children's motivation and engagement. We organize our review into four major sections: the development of children's achievement motivation; gender, cultural, and ethnic differences in children's motivation; socialization of motivation in the family; and socialization of motivation in school. We take a social‐cognitive expectancy‐value theoretical perspective to organize our discussion of this work. We first discuss the development of children's motivation and engagement and take another look at the often‐observed decline in motivation, focusing on new work showing different patterns in these declines among different groups of children. We also discuss how children's motivation relates to their performance and choice, two kinds of outcomes of major importance to children's healthy development. The second major section discusses gender, ethnic, and cultural differences in children's motivation and the important advances researchers have made in understanding these over the past 10 years. In the family and school socialization sections we focus on processes by which parents, teachers, and schools can impact children's motivation both positively and negatively. We note the similarities of these processes across socializers: Providing appropriate challenges and emotional warmth and support, and having high expectations for children. We discuss the need for more integrative studies of how parents and also teachers impact children's motivation. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of important future directions: A continuing focus on culture and motivation, further examination of motivation in specific domains and contexts, a stronger focus on biological influences on the development of motivation, and a consideration of unconscious processes and their impact on the development of motivation.

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This study examined the role of reading amount as a mediator of the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation on higher order reading comprehension (comprised of paragraph‐ and passage‐level comprehension) in a sample of 159 fifth‐grade elementary students. A positive association between intrinsic reading motivation and reading amount was assumed, whereas a negative contribution to reading amount was expected for extrinsic reading motivation. As control variables, lower order reading comprehension (comprised of word‐ and sentence‐level comprehension), gender, and social desirability were taken into account. Structural equation analyses indicated that reading amount fully mediated the positive effect of intrinsic reading motivation on higher order comprehension, whereas extrinsic reading motivation exerted both indirect and direct negative effects on comprehension. Additional analyses confirmed a suppression effect and showed significant negative contributions of extrinsic reading motivation to reading amount and reading comprehension only when intrinsic reading motivation was simultaneously included as a predictor.

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