One of the main challenges in intervention research today is understanding who benefits from universal school programs. Partly, this challenge involves capturing the diversity of experiences, needs, and traits in across students that may explain “who benefits” from interventions. Here, we studied motivation profiles (i.e., systems of beliefs, goals, and behaviors) to understand variation in treatment effects of social and emotional school interventions. Using data from a large intervention study (2,097 schools), we found four motivation profiles (growth, multiple goals, disconnected, and severely disconnected). Moreover, we found differential effects of a short social and emotional intervention, such that growth and severely disconnected, but not multiple goals or disconnected, students increased their test scores. In addition, each profile increased their use of a unique set of learning strategies. These findings suggest that motivation profiles can expand what we know about “who benefits” from social and emotional interventions and generate insights on how to improve interventions to reach a wider range of students.

Motivational self-views, such as growth mindset—the belief that abilities are malleable—and mastery goal orientation—the drive to focus on learning—predict positive academic achievement. Interventions to promote these self-views lead to greater achievement, but only when students have a supportive learning environment that can cultivate the growth of these self-views. Therefore, a better understanding of which aspects of the learning environment help shape motivational self-views is needed. The current study extends previous research by examining both observed teacher practices and students’ self-reported perceptions of the teacher and classroom environment to identify which aspects of the learning environment foster positive self-views. Multilevel Bayesian analyses of 495 6th and 7th graders nested within 17 teachers indicated that it is the students’ perceptions of their learning environment, not the objective learning-oriented practices, that foster positive self-views. This suggests that more work is needed to understand what influences students’ perceptions and how teachers can more effectively create a learning environment that fosters positive self-views in students.