Two Minds, One Uncovered Piece: What McGrew’s CAMML Reveals About the Future of Learning

Two Minds, One Uncovered Piece: What McGrew’s CAMML Reveals About the Future of Learning

By Duane Sharrock

Picture two researchers working in different corners of psychology. Neither knew the other’s full body of work. Yet both landed on the same buried problem: schools measure what a student can do, but rarely measure what a student wants to do, or how they carry that want into action.

One of these researchers is Kevin McGrew, a veteran school psychologist who spent decades building intelligence tests. In 2022, he published a framework called CAMML — the Cognitive-Affective-Motivation Model of Learning.

The other is me. I’ve spent years building something I call the Engine of Intent, along with a companion tool, the Metacognition Reflection and Reporting Tool, or MRRT.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. McGrew didn’t invent his idea from nothing. By standing on the shoulders of giants, he unearthed an old, largely forgotten theory from a psychologist named Richard Snow — and that act of digging changed the shape of everything that followed for both of us, which is similar to me. I dug up the term conation and the conative domain from Aristotle, Plato, and William James.

The Buried Theory

Snow spent his career studying something called aptitude. Today, if you ask a school psychologist what “aptitude” means, you’ll likely hear about test scores — IQ, working memory, processing speed. That’s not what Snow meant.

Snow believed aptitude was bigger than ability. He argued it included a person’s motivation, their emotional patterns, even their self-belief — not as side notes to intelligence, but as equal partners in it. He called this the whole-child view. A student’s readiness to learn wasn’t just brainpower. It was brainpower plus drive plus feeling, working together.

Then Snow passed away in 1997, before he could finish building this theory into something schools could use. And something strange happened to his legacy, in a similar way that the field partially remembers Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The field remembered the wrong part of his work.

How a Legacy Gets Cut in Half

Snow had also run a famous line of research called Aptitude-Treatment Interaction, or ATI. It asked a narrower question: does a particular teaching method work better for high-ability students or low-ability students? This research was easier to test, easier to cite, and easier to teach in graduate courses.

So that’s what stuck. Decades later, most school psychologists know Snow only through ATI — and worse, through its failures. Later reviews found that ATI effects were weak and hard to replicate, and using cognitive subtest profiles to match instruction never held up under scrutiny. Snow’s name became a cautionary tale about matching test scores to teaching styles.

Meanwhile, his bigger idea — that motivation and emotion deserve equal billing with cognition — got left in a drawer.

The Reopening

This is where McGrew steps back in. In building CAMML, he went looking specifically for that buried half of Snow’s work. He wanted to bring conation — the drive that turns knowledge and feeling into action — back into daily practice, not as an afterthought, but as a first-class variable school psychologists actually measure.

McGrew built CAMML around three moving parts. Motivation supplies the goals and self-belief that get a student to want to try. Self-regulated learning supplies the discipline that keeps a student going once they’ve started. And personality traits he drew from the Big Five and a set of social-emotional facets like curiosity and persistence to quietly shape both of the other two from underneath.

He also borrowed a memorable image from motivation research: crossing the Rubicon. A student moves from wishing, to wanting, to intending, to finally acting — a river crossing with no easy way back. Once you’re across, regulation takes over to keep you moving forward.

Where the Paths Split

Here’s the twist. McGrew built CAMML as a diagnostic lens — a way for school psychologists to think differently about assessment, to stop over-testing IQ and START paying attention to motivation and self-regulation in referred students.

His own pretty recent reflection admits the idea hasn’t taken over his field yet. He has reported that most of the citations he’s collected out of curiosity come from researchers outside school psychology, by people studying creativity, tourism, even animal welfare attitudes. The recovery of Snow’s whole-child vision is still more of a proposal than a daily practice. But it’s an educated, research-informed proposal from the scholar who improved on an influential model of intelligence.

This is awesome though because it is exactly the gap my Engine of Intent and MRRT were built in order to close.

Where CAMML names conation as important, the Engine of Intent gives it moving parts. Ignition is the spark of purpose that gets a student to care. Fuel is the internal and external resources (including those same social-emotional traits McGrew borrowed from Big Five research) that keep the spark alive. Engine design is the skill and strategy layer, the habits that turn motivation into follow-through. And road conditions are the outside pressures — stress, environment, task demands — that either smooth the path or throw obstacles in front of it.*

Notice what’s happening here. McGrew’s model describes the ingredients. I add a few more in to round out a Quartite Mind Domain Framework. The Engine of Intent, along with McGrew’s work, describes the machine those ingredients build — and how it actually runs, stalls, or breaks down in real time.

The Missing Voice

There’s one more gap, and it’s the one that matters most for a newsletter about schools.

CAMML was written for the adult in the room — the school psychologist doing the assessing. The student is the subject being measured, not the person doing the reflecting.

MRRT flips that relationship. Instead of an adult inferring a student’s motivation from behavior, MRRT asks the student directly. What do you want to be able to do more easily? How will you know you’re getting there? What will you keep, change, or stop doing next? These questions turn CAMML’s abstract categories — motivation, volition, self-belief — into something a ten-year-old can answer about their own Tuesday.

MRRT 2.0 pushes this further by building three separate views of the same data: one for the student reflecting on their own experience, one for the educator watching for patterns, and one for the system tracking hotspots across a whole building. McGrew’s model gives us the categories to sort information into. MRRT gives those categories a voice — four voices, actually, and all listening to each other.

What This Means Going Forward

So here’s the full arc, laid out. Snow buried a whole-child theory of aptitude inside a narrower, more famous research program. That theory sat mostly unused for over twenty years. McGrew went back and dug it up, giving it a modern name and a modern audience in CAMML. But recovering a theory and putting it to work so that others would engage with it and challenge it are two different tasks. In some ways, it sits with the other artifacts in a dark and dusty warehouse like Jones’s discovered Arc (Spielberg, 1981).

The Engine of Intent takes McGrew’s ingredients and turns them into a working system with moving, interacting parts. MRRT takes that system and hands the microphone back to the student, the person the whole theory was supposed to be about in the first place.

Three researchers, one long-buried question, and a chain of recovery still very much in progress. The next link in that chain is what shows up in the check-in and check-out room tomorrow morning — one student, one reflection prompt, one small crossing of their own Rubicon.

Click on the link to witness a dramatization of crossing the Rubicon, which is very different from  Julius Caesar’s historic 49 BCE crossing.

References

References

McGrew, K. S. (2022). The Cognitive-Affective-Motivation Model of Learning (CAMML): Standing on the shoulders of giants. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 37(1), 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/08295735211054270 

McGrew, K. S. (2026, January 6). The McGrew (2022) Cognitive-Affective-Motivation Model of Learning (CAMML) article update — “something is happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” IQ’s Corner. http://www.iqscorner.com/2026/01/the-mcgrew-2022-cognitive-affective.html 

Snow, R. E., Corno, L., & Jackson, D. (1996). Individual differences in affective and conative functions. In D. C. Berliner & R. C. Calfee (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (pp. 243–310). Macmillan.

Snow, R. E., Corno, L., & Cronbach, L. J. (Eds.). (2002). Remaking the concept of aptitude: Extending the legacy of Richard E. Snow. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cronbach, L. J., & Snow, R. E. (1977). Aptitudes and instructional methods: A handbook for research on interactions. Irvington Publishers.

Corno, L., & Snow, R. E. (1986). Adapting teaching to individual differences among learners. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed., pp. 605–629). Macmillan.

Shavelson, R. J., & Towne, L. (2002). Richard E. Snow’s remaking of the concept of aptitude and multitrait-multimethod perspective on instruction: An introduction. Educational Psychologist, 37(4), 195–197. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3704_1 

A note on completeness: several sources in the original research (e.g., the ATI meta-analyses and archive.org record for Snow’s book) were drawn from search snippets rather than full bibliographic records, so exact publication details for a couple of entries (author lists, page ranges) could not be fully verified against primary records. If you need publication-perfect citations for peer-reviewed submission.

* Keep an eye out for my future newsletter article on Piirto’s Pyramid, which comes up with creativity research and includes the environment as well as the practitioner in a dynamic system of influences.

Notes: 

McGrew (2022) — CAMML original article 

• Proposes integrating cognitive (CHC), affective (Big Five/social-emotional), and motivational constructs into a single “trilogy-of-the-mind” model for school psychology practice. 
• Frames motivation as the force binding cognition, conation, and affect together.
• Introduces the “crossing the Rubicon” pathway (wish → want → intention → action) to describe how motivated commitment leads to sustained self-regulated learning.
• Argues aptitude is a cognitive-conative-affective complex, not just cognitive ability, and urges selective, domain-specific cognitive testing over broad IQ batteries.
• Key insight: motivation and self-regulation deserve equal assessment weight alongside intelligence testing in school psychology practice.

McGrew (2026) — CAMML blog update

• Reflects on CAMML’s four-year reception: about 28 citations found, most from fields outside school psychology (creativity research, tourism, animal welfare attitudes).
• Acknowledges the model has not significantly shifted mainstream school psychology practice yet.
• Key insight: paradigm shifts in assessment face structural resistance from regulatory and advocacy pressures, even when the underlying theory gains traction elsewhere.

Snow, Corno, & Jackson (1996) — Individual differences in affective and conative functions 

• Presents a provisional taxonomy linking cognition (procedural/declarative knowledge), affect (temperament and emotion), and conation (motivation and volition).
• Splits conation into two components: motivation (goal orientation, fear of failure, need for achievement, self-esteem) and volition.
• Splits affect into temperament (stable, situation-independent) and emotion (situation-linked).
• Key insight: this is the foundational taxonomy McGrew builds CAMML on directly — it’s the primary source establishing conation as a distinct, measurable domain. 

Cronbach & Snow (1977) — Aptitudes and Instructional Methods 

• Established Aptitude-Treatment Interaction (ATI) as a framework: instructional treatments interact differently with learner aptitudes.
• Concluded ATI effects are common but complex, and no single ATI effect was understood well enough to base instructional practice on.
• Found highly structured instruction helps lower-ability students but can hinder higher-ability students.
• Key insight: Snow himself flagged the neglect of social aspects of learning as a serious weakness in ATI research — an early admission that the model was incomplete.

Corno & Snow (1986) — Adapting teaching to individual differences 

• Defines adaptive teaching as addressing individual learner needs while pursuing common classroom goals, via two paths: adapting instruction to students, and adapting students to instruction.
• Introduces “microadaptation” — real-time teacher adjustments during instruction along two paths: aptitude circumvention (support) and aptitude development (building capacity).
• Key insight: this work operationalizes Snow’s aptitude theory into classroom practice, showing that adaptation must work in both directions — environment to learner and learner to environment.

Snow, Corno, & Cronbach (Eds., 2002) — Remaking the Concept of Aptitude 

• Posthumous capstone volume completed by the Stanford Aptitude Seminar, synthesizing Snow’s 35 years of research plus contributions from European scholars.
• Key insight: this is the most complete articulation of Snow’s “whole-child” aptitude vision — the source McGrew explicitly tries to recover through CAMML.

Shavelson & Towne (2002) — Introduction to Snow special issue 

• States the special issue’s primary theme is aptitude “broadly defined to accommodate cognitive, affective, and conative characteristics,” confirming the scope of Snow’s real theoretical ambition.
• Key insight: even a decade after his major ATI work, scholars honoring Snow’s legacy emphasized the broader, multidimensional aptitude theory as his more significant contribution — the piece the field largely overlooked in practice.

More notes: 

The “crossing the Rubicon” concept comes from German psychologists Heinz Heckhausen and Peter Gollwitzer, who introduced it as part of their Rubicon Model of Action Phases in 1987. McGrew borrowed the term from this source. Wikipedia

The model uses Julius Caesar’s historic 49 BCE crossing of the Rubicon River as a metaphor for the irreversible shift from deliberation to commitment. Heckhausen and Gollwitzer divided goal pursuit into four phases — predecisional, preactional, actional, and postactional — with the “Rubicon” marking the boundary between the predecisional (motivational, wish-weighing) phase and the volitional (implemental, goal-executing) phases that follow. Once a wish becomes a binding goal intention, the person is said to have “crossed the Rubicon,” shifting from a deliberative mindset to an implemental one focused on executing rather than reconsidering the choice. 

McGrew explicitly cites Heckhausen (1985, 1987, 1989) as the originator of this “Rubicon” motivation-to-action framework in his own writing on the related Model of Achievement Competence Motivation, confirming the direct lineage from Heckhausen and Gollwitzer to CAMML