This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South Korea, Hong Kong China, Singapore, and Japan; 5 top-performing Western countries, including Finland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands; and the 3 "superpower" countries of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ten extensively studied achievement-related attitudinal and behavioral variables--including attitudes toward school, enjoyment, learning strategies, reading habits, and reading strategies--were investigated. Overall, when comparing the East and West across the 10 variables, there were small to medium effect sizes, with Cohen's d ranging from 0.04 to 0.47, which resulted in salient differences between the 2 regions. More important, there were striking similarities across all 13 countries in their "best" predictor of reading achievement--either enjoyment of reading or utilization of reading strategies to efficiently summarize the text. Enjoyment of reading in particular was a strong predictor at both individual and country levels. This study concludes that what motivates human learning is invariant across countries with vastly different educational, cultural, and language systems.