As an intermediary between U.S. state and federal policy and the school, the school district, many scholars maintain, remains a key player in meeting the needs of school-level leadership. Moreover, the job of the principal is difficult and has become increasingly complex as a result of increased pressure, accountability, and oversight under the No Child Left Behind Act (now the Every Student Succeeds Act) in the United States. These two propositions raise important questions about what we know (and do not yet know) about how to support school leaders’ learning and development in their quest to effectively lead a school. In this review, we use extant social-cognitive theories of motivation to organize the research on district effectiveness in pursuit of the following question: How does the district as a key player in school/instructional improvement facilitate conditions under which school principals’ learning, development, and success are enhanced? In pursuing this question, we hoped to strengthen two particular weaknesses in this strand of scholarship: (1) the concern that research in this particular area is relatively atheoretical and (2) concerns about the applicability of this research to practice.

中文翻译：

---

了解地区对领导者发展和问责时代成功的支持：使用社会认知动机理论的文献回顾

许多学者认为，作为美国州和联邦政策与学校之间的中介，学区仍然是满足学校领导层需求的关键角色。此外，由于美国《不让一个孩子掉队法案》（现在的《每个学生都成功法案》）下的压力、责任和监督增加，校长的工作很困难，而且变得越来越复杂。这两个命题提出了一些重要问题，即我们知道（和尚不知道）什么，即如何支持学校领导在寻求有效领导学校的过程中的学习和发展。在这篇综述中，我们使用现存的社会认知动机理论来组织对区域有效性的研究，以寻求以下问题：作为学校/教学改进的主要参与者，学区如何促进促进校长学习、发展和成功的条件？在探讨这个问题时，我们希望加强这一系列学术中的两个特别弱点：（1）担心这一特定领域的研究相对非理论化；（2）担心这项研究在实践中的适用性。