The ubiquity of formal education in modern nations is often accompanied by an assumption that students' motivation for learning is innate and self-sustaining. The latter is true for most children in domains (e.g., language) that are universal and have a deep evolutionary history, but this does not extend to learning in evolutionarily novel domains…

The computational model of school achievement represents a novel approach to theorizing school achievement, conceptualizing educational interventions as modifications to students' learning curves. By modeling the process and products of educational achievement simultaneously, this tool addresses several unresolved questions in educational…