Abstract

COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION, 1988, 5(4), 267 Copyright o 1988, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. EDITOR'S COMMENT The first article and accompanying commentaries herein continue Cogni- tion and Instruction's efforts to bridge disciplinary and subdisciplinary fields and to bring together lines of research relevant to instructional theory that have been pursued independently. Susan Bobbitt Nolen's article reports research on the ways in which individual differences in motivational orientation influence use of study strategies. She explores a causal pathway from motivational orientation to use of study strategies to eventual cognitive outcomes. Although the full set of relationships on this pathway is not empirically tested in her study, her article begins to link research domains that, until now, have been pursued almost entirely independently. To highlight and explore the growing convergence of research on motiva- tion and cognition that Nolen's article may signal, I asked two individuals to comment on it. Mark R. Lepper responds from the perspective of a social psychologist interested in the problem of intrinsic motivation for learning. He situates Nolen's work within a broad body of research on motivation that is beginning to distinguish not only how much learning effort students will expend, but also what kind of effort