Spotlight on Student Engagement, Motivation, and Achievement

Nobody stays in school because of Algebra 2." This educator's chance remark captures an essential truth: what keeps students in school—or fails to—is rarely the content that they are taught. Only when students feel engaged both socially and academically can schools and teachers lay the groundwork to motivate achievement. This volume, the fifth in the Harvard Education Letter Spotlight series, brings together fifteen seminal articles that examine research and practice on these complex and interrelated issues.