ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the various causes of student anxiety, indifference to learning and motivational deficits that characterize much school life today, and to consider how schools can combat these self-defeating achievement patterns. This involves an exploration of a variety of cognitive and affective factors that influence school achievement and of how cognitive skills instruction can be combined with attempts to create an appropriate affective climate for classroom learning. Much of our present knowledge about the nature of learning and thinking comes from laboratory evidence; yet, in actuality, most classroom learning occurs in a context far removed from the laboratory and involves personal stress, anxiety, and the threat of academic failure. For this reason, we attempt to build a bridge between the kinds of cognitive variables that are typically studied in laboratory research and the kinds of affective variables that enter into actual school learning. Thus, the overall intent of the chapter is integrative in nature, embracing such topics as social cognition and attribution, achievement motivation, fear-of-failure dynamics, and current views of information processing and problem solving as they apply to actual classroom learning.
