Educational Psychology Research Group Seminar

In this research seminar, Professor Arief Liem, National Institute of Education - Psychology and Child & Human Development, Signapore will present his research on the cultural and contextual influences on student motivation.

(Please note, this seminar will be held in John Foster Building on the ground floor, Room G12)

Understanding how students become motivated requires rethinking how they see themselves in relation to others. Much of the foundational research in achievement motivation—self-efficacy, achievement goals, attributional processes, expectancy–value beliefs, and self-determination theory—has been grounded in an independent-self worldview. From this perspective, motivation arises within the individual, and agency is expressed through personal choice, internal control, and self-initiated action. Yet, in many cultures and contexts, students do not view themselves primarily as autonomous individuals but as fundamentally connected to significant others. An interdependent-self perspective offers a complementary lens—one that conceives motivation as relational, socially grounded, and culturally patterned. Rather than focusing solely on internal beliefs and personal agency, this view highlights how students’ actions are shaped by obligations, role expectations, relational harmony, and collective purpose. This presentation advances a cultural and contextual model of student motivation that integrates both independent and interdependent pathways. Using the self-construal framework, I illustrate how the roles of parents, teachers, and peers shift depending on the lens through which the self is understood. Through an independent-self lens, significant others function as (a) socialization agents who shape beliefs, values, and mindsets, and as (b) support providers who nurture autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Through an interdependent-self lens, however, close others become incorporated into the self, and motivation unfolds in culturally patterned ways: (a) concomitant model in which independent and interdependent motives can operate concurrently and reinforce one another; (b) antecedent mode, in which interdependent motives serve as distal foundations that eventually give rise to more personal forms of motivation; and (c) self-and-other-integration model, in which motivation becomes fundamentally relational, as students act with and for significant others, experiencing goals as shared—“ours” rather than “mine.” Rather than treating cultures as binary or stereotyping learners, this framework underscores cultural nuance, situational variability, and the multiple forms of agency students enact. By bringing independent and interdependent perspectives into a single cultural model, the talk offers a more inclusive and context-sensitive understanding of student motivation—one that better reflects the lived realities of learners across diverse societies. Implications for theory development, instructional practice, and global educational research will also be discussed.

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