A group of internationally renowned scholars discuss their research on motivation.

In recent years, educators have become increasingly concerned with students' attempts to manage their own learning and achievement efforts through activities that influence the instigation, direction and persistence of those efforts. In 1989, Zimmerman and Schunk edited the first book devoted to this topic. They assembled key theorists offering a range of perspectives on how students self-regulate their academic functioning. One purpose of that volume was to provide theoretical direction to ongoing as well as nascent efforts to explore academic self-regulatory processes. Since that date, there has been an exponential surge in research. This second volume on academic self-regulation offers the fruits of the first generation of research. It also addresses a number of key issues that have arisen since then such as how self-regulation differs from such related constructs as motivation and metacognition, and whether students can be taught self-regulatory skills. The contributors reveal an interesting, uplifting, and at times, disturbing picture of how students grapple with the day-to-day problems of achieving in circumstances with inherent limitations and obstacles. This volume provides insight into the source of students' capabilities to surmount adversities -- the origins of their self-initiated processes designed to improve learning, motivation, and achievement. The text is organized on the basis of a conceptual framework that analyzes academic self-regulation into four major dimensions. That model is presented in the first chapter, and key processes that influence each of these dimensions are discussed by prominent researchers in the chapters that follow. Because each chapter is written to follow a common format, this work provides a level of continuity and parsimony normally found only in authored textbooks.

Philosophers and behavioral scientists discuss what, if anything, of the traditional concept of individual conscious will can survive recent scientific discoveries that human decision-making is distributed across different brain processes and through the social environment. Recent scientific findings about human decision making would seem to threaten the traditional concept of the individual conscious will. The will is threatened from "below" by the discovery that our apparently spontaneous actions are actually controlled and initiated from below the level of our conscious awareness, and from "above" by the recognition that we adapt our actions according to social dynamics of which we are seldom aware. In Distributed Cognition and the Will, leading philosophers and behavioral scientists consider how much, if anything, of the traditional concept of the individual conscious will survives these discoveries, and they assess the implications for our sense of freedom and responsibility. The contributors all take science seriously, and they are inspired by the idea that apparent threats to the cogency of the idea of will might instead become the basis of its reemergence as a scientific subject. They consider macro-scale issues of society and culture, the micro-scale dynamics of the mind/brain, and connections between macro-scale and micro-scale phenomena in the self-guidance and self-regulation of personal behavior. Contributors George Ainslie, Wayne Christensen, Andy Clark, Paul Sheldon Davies, Daniel C. Dennett, Lawrence A. Lengbeyer, Dan Lloyd, Philip Pettit, Don Ross, Tamler Sommers, Betsy Sparrow, Mariam Thalos, Jeffrey B. Vancouver, Daniel M. Wegner, Tadeusz W. Zawidzki

This is an impressive book, which presents a profoundly new approach to analyzing human behavior. The fundamental concept is to focus on how people link motivation with action and why they do or do not stick with their original intentions. The fascinating studies reported here attempt to separate people into two groups: (1) State-oriented individuals who focus under stress on past, present, or future states, rather than on options available for action; versus (2) Action-oriented individuals who focus under stress on action alternatives. This book will be of great interest to both behavioral and cognitive psychologists, psychophysiologists, and specialists in sport as well as aviation psychology.

Metacognitive strategies such as cognitive self-instruction have important implications for teaching and learning. Cognitive self-instruction (CSI) has proven successful in improving memory, comprehension, problem-solving, and behavioral self-control of both teachers and students. This book is the first to combine the theoretical/conceptual and research aspects of CSI with applied classroom practices. Drawing on over a decade of research and utilization of the methods described here, Manning suggests applications of CSI for classroom strategies, classroom management, and teacher reflection.

How is free will possible in the light of the physical and chemical underpinnings of brain activity and recent neurobiological experiments? How can the emergence of complexity in hierarchical systems such as the brain, based at the lower levels in physical interactions, lead to something like genuine free will? The nature of our understanding of free will in the light of present-day neuroscience is becoming increasingly important because of remarkable discoveries on the topic being made by neuroscientists at the present time, on the one hand, and its crucial importance for the way we view ourselves as human beings, on the other. A key tool in understanding how free will may arise in this context is the idea of downward causation in complex systems, happening coterminously with bottom up causation, to form an integral whole. Top-down causation is usually neglected, and is therefore emphasized in the other part of the book’s title. The concept is explored in depth, as are the ethical and legal implications of our understanding of free will. This book arises out of a workshop held in California in April of 2007, which was chaired by Dr. Christof Koch. It was unusual in terms of the breadth of people involved: they included physicists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and theologians. This enabled the meeting, and hence the resulting book, to attain a rather broader perspective on the issue than is often attained at academic symposia. The book includes contributions by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, George F. R. Ellis , Christopher D. Frith, Mark Hallett, David Hodgson, Owen D. Jones, Alicia Juarrero, J. A. Scott Kelso, Christof Koch, Hans Küng, Hakwan C. Lau, Dean Mobbs, Nancey Murphy, William Newsome, Timothy O’Connor, Sean A.. Spence, and Evan Thompson.