The research presented in this paper was carried out in 2002 within the framework of the Russian Academy of Education's comprehensive program "The Sociology of Education." This article is based on the materials from a sociological survey of 2,983 students in the seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades of general education schools in Moscow. A total of 1,065, 1,120, and 798 students were surveyed in the three age groups. The questionnaire that was formulated included 144 closed, scale ["shkal'nye"], and open questions. A key objective of the research program was to study the characteristics of students' attitudes toward learning activity "at the stage of transition from adolescence to young adulthood". In this article, the author examines the factors that affect any changes in the motivations and the goal orientations of the learning activity and the dynamics of the transformation of key components in the past fifteen years. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)