Engagement and disaffection as organizational constructs in the dynamics of motivational development.

Theories and research on children’s motivation in school employ a wealth of constructs to explain its differential development (Wigfield, Eccles, Schiefele, Roeser, & Davis-Kean, 2006). Classes of major predictors have been drawn from work on self-system processes, such as perceived control, goal orientations, self-efficacy, and autonomy, as well as from work on social contexts, including interpersonal contexts provided by teachers, parents, and peers and organizational contexts like school climate and curriculum. A common thread runs through these diverse bodies of research, namely, that the proximal outcomes of academic motivation can be captured by a construct depicting children’s active, constructive, focused enthusiastic involvement and participation in the activities of learning, a construct that has been referred to as academic engagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). In this chapter, we make the case that engagement is a central construct critical in explaining the development of the entire motivational system. First, we present the definitional features of engagement and disaffection, focusing on an action theoretical conceptualization. Second, we briefly review major theories of motivation to show that such constructs appear in all of them. Third, we demonstrate how these