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How to help students find their own motivation?  Getting them to stay connected to their goals, to the content, to each other.

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If you would like to review the instructions or goals another time

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How do we design feedback to encourage student intrinsic motivation?

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"The Spark of Learning" by Sarah Rose Cavanagh

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"The Spark of Learning" by Sarah Rose Cavanagh

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Podcast (tihe_podcast):

Sarah Rose Cavanagh shares about The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion* on episode #135 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Resources Mentioned

Recommendations

Bonni

Sarah

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Rate/review the show. Please consider rating or leaving a review for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on whatever service you use to listen to it on ( iTunes, Stitcher, etc.). It is the best way to help others discover the show.

Give feedback. As always, I welcome suggestions for future topics or guests.

Subscribe. If you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update, you can receive a single email each week with the show notes (including all the links we talk about on the episode), as well as an article on either teaching or productivity.

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The Spark of Learning - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Sarah Rose Cavanagh shares about The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion* on episode #135 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Resources Mentioned Caring isn't Coddling by Sarah Rose Cavanagh VALUE rubrics from the Association of American Colleges and Universities Planet Money Episode 216: How Four Drinking Buddies Saved [Continue Reading...]

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DISCOVERY LAB Review a Resource or Strategy Handout.docx

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Conclusion - Complement the process not the product - design the experiential learning so you see the process

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Conclusion - Complement the process not the product - design the experiential learning so you see the process

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1) Praise process/effort not product/results
2) Provide concrete corrective feedback
3) Do not give false praise

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Carol Dweck - A Study on Praise and Mindsets

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Many of today's parents and educators have grown up in an atmosphere where heaping abundant amounts of praise on students is expected to reinforce motivation and learning.

If you still believe it is essential for you to tell your kids or your pupils things like "You're the best", "You can do it" and "You're a winner", you are very wide of the mark.

"We should be generous with kids, but that kind of praise isn't motivational. It's just the opposite," says Professor Terje Manger of the University of Bergen's Department of Psychology.

Summary of research on motivation

Manger is a member of the Psychology Department's Bergen Learning and Cognition Group and was asked to assess the conclusions from research on motivating children.

Hundreds of studies have been conducted, but this is the first time that a Norwegian professor has summarised this research.

Focus on proficiency, not the person

Manger says that one of the key factors for a child's success in school is that parents and teachers really expect and count on the child to learn something.

Adults need to be engaged and supportive - but not indiscriminately supportive.

"A pupil who fails to grasp a subject will not believe exaggerated praise. The pupil has so little self-esteem that he or she will see through the praise and find it hollow and unconvincing. Then the encouragement has the opposite effect," Manger said.

On the other hand, if the teacher can determine what the pupil already knows, so that assignments can be tailored to this level as a point of departure, and so the teacher can provide constructive feedback on progress, the child's chances of learning and being motivated will increase.

Feedback that contains information specific to the pupil will be much more motivational. Above all, the child will have the sense that he or she is making headway and beginning to master a subject, which is a main factor in gaining self-confidence.

Authoritative teachers are best

Manger's studies of research results also point to another fact - one type of teacher tends to be the most successful at motivating pupils.

Researchers call this an authoritative teacher.

"An authoritative teacher wants and expects the pupils to learn. At the same time, he or she projects a lot of care for and attention to the pupil," Manger said.

An authoritarian teacher makes academic demands, without attempting to display the same care and attention to the pupil.

Teachers can be divided into four types: authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent and neglectful. Fortunately the latter category is rare.

Manger says there is a huge difference between authoritarian teachers and authoritative teachers.

Indulgent teachers are an extra burden

Some international studies show that when it comes to successfully motivating pupils, the gap is particularly wide between authoritative and indulgent teachers.

An indulgent teacher can be competent in the subjects taught and be a good, caring adult who gives a pupil a lot of attention. But this type of educator will tend to overlook the facts that all pupils, including those who are not great achievers, appreciate being subjected to demands.

Such teachers also score poorly in their abilities to lead and maintain discipline in a classroom.

"Indulgent teachers have a direct negative impact on pupils' motivation and contentment, primarily because they have low expectations and demands. This can actually be experienced as an extra burden among the pupils who are struggling to learn," says Manger.

Authoritarian better than indulgent

He was surprised to find research concluding that indulgent teachers appear to be a greater impediment for school children's motivation than authoritarian teachers are.

"An authoritarian teacher scores lower in caregiving and attentiveness, but makes higher scholastic demands. International studies place this type of teacher ahead of indulgent ones with regard to pupils' learning and contentment."

Teachers need to be taught leadership

Manger thinks Nordic schools may have suffered because many teachers have been overindulgent.

"The most important focus we could have in Norwegian schools today would be to increase teachers' competence in leading school classes."

Excessive testing undermines motivation

An extensive testing culture, which currently holds sway as a cure for problems with schools, gets little support from the systematic study of research literature.

"A stringent test regimen that unilaterally focuses on grading undermines the motivation of weak as well as creative pupils. We could be doing ourselves a disservice if we place too much emphasis on that recipe," says Manger.

Research does show that tests serve an important function, however.

"Tests motivate individual pupils. Tests are also important for gauging scholastic progress and a pupil's development. But when a teacher uses tests, he or she should emphasize giving the pupils feedback on their progress. This enables pupils to progress from their individual levels," says the researcher.

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Weak students don't benefit from excessive praise

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Many of today's parents and educators have grown up in an atmosphere where heaping abundant amounts of praise on students is expected to reinforce motivation and learning. If you still believe it is essential for you to tell your kids or your pupils things like "You're the best", "You can do it" and "You're a winner", you are very wide of the mark.

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OS Round 3 - How to motivate students to do their best

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Is it really about motivation or is it really about the environment?

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Is it really about motivation or is it really about the environment?

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Mary Julie Ivan

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We can't change what they come with... how do we create the optimal environment when they get to us?

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We can't change what they come with... how do we create the optimal environment when they get to us?

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Sell the ‘product’/connect the dots each class.  “This is going to be easier for you if you do well at x”.

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Sell the ‘product’/connect the dots each class.  “This is going to be easier for you if you do well at x”.

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Some programs have mandatory attendance and some do not. When thinking about motivation we need to think beyond attendance.

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Where do we begin?
Intrinsic vs Extrinsic
Micro
Meso
Macro

Connecting the student role to the future professional role
motivators

Surveys - proven valuable to gather class feedback but fails  capture individual needs

Class activity or strategy to identify
Motivating Students

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Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.  — Stephen. R. Covey

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Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just stand there.—  Will Rogers

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Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just stand there.—  Will Rogers

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"Everything I need to know, I learned in Kindergarten."  Let's think about the social constructs that may now be missing...

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They key to success

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Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

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Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

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Key messages: be knowledgeable and enthusiastic in your field.  Focus on first class.  Apply common sense principles of pedagogy/andragogy, e.g. UDL.

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Last week, we addressed the factors that instructors believe keep college students motivated. This week, we'll share the student perspective. Will the responses that instructors gave align with those shared by the students?

In our recent Student Engagement Insights survey, we asked: "What motivates you most to succeed in college?" Over 3,500 students responded. Here's how they answered:

Almost half (49%) of the students selected "career goals" as their primary motivating factor for success. (Nearly the same percentage of instructors-46%-listed this as the most important factor.)

"Future earning goals" came in second, with 17% of students ranking this as their top motivator. (Approximately the same percentage of instructors, 18%, answered in this way.)

Fourteen percent of students listed their GPA as a primary motivator. (A greater percentage of instructors, 22%, felt that students believed the GPA is most important.)

Another 14% of students stated that their plan for an advanced or additional degree motivated them to succeed. (Only 6% of instructors thought this was the most pressing motivation for students.)

What else keeps college students motivated and on a path towards success?

The results show that 6% of students selected that something other than the above-named choices served as the main catalyst of their success. We noticed some commonalities among these responses, too. Here are some of the top answers:

Family. Quite a few students listed their children, their spouses, and other members of their family as a strong motivator. Inspiring responses related to their families' role in their motivation included:

"Knowing that my career goals will allow a better life for my family."

"...it was the last thing my dad asked me to do before he passed, because he knew I could do it."

"Setting a positive example for my child"

"Show kids it's never too late"

Knowledge and learning. A good number of students place a high priority on the joy of learning and the empowerment it can bring. They said things like "I want to learn new things & be educated to better conquer my world," and "...I love school, which is a motivator in itself... It is hard to not be motivated for something you love."

Personal satisfaction. Many students are primarily driven by wanting to fulfill their sense of accomplishment, and their dream of completing a long-held personal goal. One student is motivated by "self-satisfaction for doing a job to the best of my ability," while another wrote, "I have always wanted to go to college and get a degree, so I want to finish what I have started."

The ability to help and set an example for others. Other students feel the responsibility of serving as an encouragement to others in their lives. They wrote that they want "to set an example for the younger ones in my family to acheive higher education and earning potential," and "to spread the knowledge that I have learned throughout my college years." They also hold on to "the knowledge that someday, upon completion of requirements for my bachelor's or master's degree that I will be able to help people."

How do you keep college students motivated in your courses? In what ways do you encourage them to keep their "eyes on the prize"? Share your strategies in the comments.

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What Keeps College Students Motivated? Their Responses

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Last week, we addressed the factors that instructors believe keep college students motivated. This week, we'll share the student perspective. Will the responses that instructors gave align with those shared by the students? In our recent Student Engagement Insights survey, we asked: "What motivates you most to succeed in college?"

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Motivating Students with Teaching Techniques

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Motivating Students with Teaching Techniques

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"Underachievement in college students is linked to lack of motivation"

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Underachievement in college students is linked to lack of motivation (Balduf, 2009 and references therein). Two major factors that contribute to poor motivation are inability of students to see the relevance of classroom activities to their chosen careers (Glynn et al., 2009) and lack of a sense of autonomy (Reeve and Jang, 2006; Reeve, 2009).

In this article, I provide examples of how I addressed these two issues with activities that promote experiential learning and encourage students to be more active participants in their learning. These techniques were used mainly in science courses but could be adapted to other disciplines.

Establishing Relevance
Experiential learning is a process through which students develop skills through direct experience. While most people think of experiential learning as something that happens outside the classroom, it is possible to give students real-life experiences in the classroom, too.

I am explicit with my students about the desired outcomes and utility of my assigned activities, but the key to my success has been to design activities that simulate real-life scenarios. Oftentimes, this simply involves re-naming an activity using professional rather than academic jargon. For example, rather than asking my students to write a lab report (academic jargon), I refer to it as a primary article (professional jargon). In several of my courses I have taken this one step further. I have adopted the style of a relevant journal for their lab reports (e.g. I use Development, for my developmental biology course, and Animal Behaviour for my animal behavior course) and give my students the Instructions for Authors from the publishers to use as formatting guidelines. Learning to write correctly for a real journal was more motivating for my students than simply learning to write in a way that "pleases Dr. Robertson," and the quality of their lab reports improved.

Other similar techniques my colleagues and I have used to simulate "real life scenarios" in the classroom include asking students to write an NIH grant proposal following actual NIH grant proposal guidelines (NIH, 2010). This assignment replaces one which asked them to write a senior research project proposal, which implied (in their minds) that they were being tasked with something that only college seniors do. Since changing our approach, we have noticed an improvement in the quality of their proposals.

In addition, I no longer ask my students to write essays (after all, who in the professional world writes essays?). I ask them to write articles in the style of the New York Times. I also have stopped asking students to write summaries; I now ask them to write reviews in the style of a secondary article from a journal such as Scientific American. Instead of writing reflections, I ask them to write self-evaluations or personal statements in the style of a professional self-evaluation or a statement that they might use for an application to graduate school.

Encouraging Autonomy
It is common practice for professors to provide explicit instructions and grading rubrics to students. However, overly-comprehensive instructions can stifle creativity, hinder independence, and actually lower motivation (Reeve, 2009; Robertson, 2013). Autonomy-supportive teaching styles improve student motivation as well as encourage independent thought and critical thinking (Reeve, 2009).

To enhance student autonomy, I don't give my students explicit guidelines or grading rubrics, but rather get them to write their own. As an extension to the activity described above, in which students model the style of a particular journal for their lab reports, I often ask my students to write detailed Instructions for Authors as an assignment. In doing so, they must identify for themselves (mostly correctly) what qualities a good paper should possess. Following that activity, I asked them to use those instructions to write a grading rubric, and then use the grading rubric to grade their own papers. This not only gives them a sense of autonomy, but it helps them develop their self-editing skills.

Others things I've done to encourage students as partners in the learning process, include:

asking students to pick a topic from their textbook, which they are then responsible for teaching to the rest of the class;

soliciting input on the syllabus by allowing the class to select the topics for a few "students' choice" lectures; and

assigning students to write a personal statement about their experiences in the course in which they identify their own weaknesses and request exercises to help them overcome those weaknesses.

The latter was particularly beneficial in helping me improve the course because many of the weaknesses they identified were common to the group and reflected a problem of general student perception or in my teaching style - both of which I was able to address.

These adjustments to the way I approach teaching were easy to make and have resulted in better student engagement and better quality assignments, which was my main goal. However, I also believe that my students left my classes with the perception that they had also learned something "useful" that they can apply in their professional careers.

References:
Balduf, M. (2009) Underachievement among College Students. J. Adv. Academics, 20 (2), 274-294.

Glynn, S. M., Taasoobshirazi, G. and Brickham, P. (2009) Science Motivation Questionnaire: Construct Validation with Nonscience Majors. J. Res. Sci. Teaching, 46 (2), 127-146.

NIH, (2010) Quick Guide for Grant Applications. Available online from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ep/Tutorial.html.

Reeve, J. (2009) Why Teachers adopt a Controlling Motivating Style Toward Students and How They can Become More Autonomy Supportive. Educational Psychologist, 44 (3), 159-175.

Reeve, J. and Jang, H. (2009). What Teachers Say and Do to Support Students' Autonomy during a Learning Activity. J. Ed. Psych. 98 (1), 209-218.

Robertson, K. (2013) Assessment as an Opportunity for Developing Independent Thinking Skills in Students. Faculty Focus, April 1, 2013. Available online at https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/educational-assessment/assessment-as-an-opportunity-for-developing-independent-thinking-skills-in-students/.
Dr. Katherine Robertson is an associate professor in the Department of Biology at Westminster College.

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Motivating Students with Teaching Techniques that Establish Relevance, Promote Autonomy

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Underachievement in college students is linked to lack of motivation (Balduf, 2009 and references therein). Two major factors that contribute to poor motivation are inability of students to see the relevance of classroom activities to their chosen careers (Glynn et al., 2009) and lack of a sense of autonomy (Reeve and Jang, 2006; Reeve, 2009).

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Cite this guide: Yarborough, C. B., & Fedesco, H. N. (2020). Motivating students. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu//cft/guides-sub-pages/motivating-students/.

Introduction

Fostering student motivation is a difficult but necessary aspect of teaching that instructors must consider. Many may have led classes where students are engaged, motivated, and excited to learn, but have also led classes where students are distracted, disinterested, and reluctant to engage-and, probably, have led classes that are a mix. What factors influence students' motivation? How can instructors promote students' engagement and motivation to learn? While there are nuances that change from student to student, there are also models of motivation that serve as tools for thinking through and enhancing motivation in our classrooms. This guide will look at three frameworks: the expectancy-value-cost model of motivation, the ARCS model of instructional design, and self-determination theory. These three models highlight some of the major factors that influence student motivation, often drawing from and demonstrating overlap among their frameworks. The aim of this guide is to explore some of the literature on motivation and offer practical solutions for understanding and enhancing student motivation.

Expectancy - Value - Cost Model

The purpose of the original expectancy-value model was to predict students' achievement behaviors within an educational context. The model has since been refined to include cost as one of the three major factors that influence student motivation. Below is a description of the three factors, according to the model, that influence motivation.

Expectancy refers to a student's expectation that they can actually succeed in the assigned task. It energizes students because they feel empowered to meet the learning objectives of the course.

Value involves a student's ability to perceive the importance of engaging in a particular task. This gives meaning to the assignment or activity because students are clear on why the task or behavior is valuable.

Cost points to the barriers that impede a student's ability to be successful on an assignment, activity and/or the course at large. Therefore, students might have success expectancies and perceive high task value, however, they might also be aware of obstacles to their engagement or a potential negative affect resulting in performance of the task, which could decrease their motivation.

Three important questions to consider from the student perspective:
1. Expectancy - Can I do the task?

2. Value - Do I want to do the task?

* Intrinsic or interest value: the inherent enjoyment that an individual experiences from engaging in the task for its own sake.

* Utility value: the usefulness of the task in helping achieve other short term or long-term goals.

* Attainment value: the task affirms a valued aspect of an individual's identity and meets a need that is important to the individual.

3. Cost - Am I free of barriers that prevent me from investing my time, energy, and resources into the activity?

It's important to note that expectancy, value and cost are not shaped only when a student enters your classroom. These have been shaped over time by both individual and contextual factors. Each of your students comes in with an initial response, however there are strategies for encouraging student success, clarifying subject meaning and finding ways to mitigate costs that will increase your students' motivation. Everyone may not end up at the same level of motivation, but if you can increase each student's motivation, it will help the overall atmosphere and productivity of the course that you are teaching.

Strategies to Enhance Expectancy, Value, and Cost

Hulleman et. al (2016) summarize research-based sources that positively impact students' expectancy beliefs, perceptions of task value, and perceptions of cost, which might point to useful strategies that instructors can employ.

Research-based sources of expectancy-related beliefs

Expectancy source

Definition

Research-based sources of value

Research-based sources of cost

Sources:

Barron K. E., & Hulleman, C. S. (2015). Expectancy-value-cost model of motivation. International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 8, 503-509.

Hulleman, C. S., Barron, K. E., Kosovich, J. J., & Lazowski, R. A. (2016). Student motivation: Current theories, constructs, and interventions within an expectancy-value framework. In A. A. Lipnevich et al. (Eds.), Psychosocial Skills and School Systems in the 21st Century. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

ARCS Model of Instructional Design

The ARCS model of instructional design was created to improve the motivational appeal of instructional materials. The ARCS model is grounded in an expectancy-value framework, which assumes that people are motivated to engage in an activity if it's perceived to be linked to the satisfaction of personal needs and if there is a positive expectancy for success. The purpose of this model was to fill a gap in the motivation literature by providing a model that could more clearly allow instructors to identify strategies to help improve motivation levels within their students.

ARCS is an acronym that stands for four factors, according to the model, that influence student motivation: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction.

Attention refers to getting and sustaining student attention and directing attention to the appropriate stimuli.

Relevance involves making instruction applicable to present and future career opportunities, showing that learning in it of itself is enjoyable, and/or focusing on process over product by satisfying students' psychological needs (e.g., need for achievement, need for affiliation).

Confidence includes helping students believe that some level of success is possible if effort is exerted.

Satisfaction is attained by helping students feel good about their accomplishments and allowing them to exert some degree of control over the learning experience.

To use the ARCS instructional design model, these steps can be followed:

Define

Classify the problem

Analyze audience motivation

Prepare motivational objectives (i.e., identify which factor in the ARCS model to target based on the defined problem and audience analysis).

Design

Generate potential motivational strategies for each objective

Select strategies that a) don't take up too much instructional time; b) don't detract from instructional objectives; c) fall within time and money constraints; d) are acceptable to the audience; and e) are compatible with the instructor's personal style, preferences, and mode of instruction.

Develop

Prepare motivational elements

Integrate materials with instruction

Evaluate

Conduct a developmental try-out

Assess motivational outcomes

Strategies to Enhance Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction

Keller (1987) provides several suggestions for how instructors can positively impact students' attention, perceived relevance, confidence, and satisfaction.

Attention Strategies
Incongruity, Conflict

Introduce a fact that seems to contradict the learner's past experience.

Present an example that does not seem to exemplify a given concept.

Introduce two equally plausible facts or principles, only one of which can be true.

Play devil's advocate.

Concreteness Variability

In stand up delivery, vary the tone of your voice, and use body movement, pauses, and props.

Vary the format of instruction (information presentation, practice, testing, etc.) according to the attention span of the audience.

Vary the medium of instruction (platform delivery, film, video, print, etc.).

Break up print materials by use of white space, visuals, tables, different typefaces, etc.

Change the style of presentation (humorous-serious, fast-slow, loud-soft, active-passive, etc.).

Shift between student-instructor interaction and student-student interaction.

Humor Inquiry Participation
Use games, role plays, or simulations that require learner participation.

Relevance Strategies
Experience Present Worth
State explicitly the present intrinsic value of learning the content, as distinct from its value as a link to future goals.
Future Usefulness

State explicitly how the instruction relates to future activities of the learner.

Ask learners to relate the instruction to their own future goals (future wheel).

Need Matching Modeling Choice

Provide meaningful alternative methods for accomplishing a goal.

Provide personal choices for organizing one's work.

Confidence Strategies
Learning Requirements Difficulty
Organize materials on an increasing level of difficulty; that is, structure the learning material to provide a "conquerable" challenge.
Expectations Attributions

Attribute student success to effort rather than luck or ease of task when appropriate (i.e., when you know it's true!).

Encourage student efforts to verbalize appropriate attributions for both successes and failures.

Self-Confidence
Satisfaction Strategies
Natural Consequences Unexpected Rewards

Reward intrinsically interesting task performance with unexpected, non-contingent rewards.

Reward boring tasks with extrinsic, anticipated rewards.

Positive Outcomes

Give verbal praise for successful progress or accomplishment.

Give personal attention to students.

Provide informative, helpful feedback when it is immediately useful.

Provide motivating feedback (praise) immediately following task performance.

Negative Influences Scheduling
Source: Keller, J. M. (1987). Development and use of the ARCS model of instructional design. Journal of Instructional Development, 10, 2-10.

Self-Determination Theory

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro-theory of human motivation, emotion, and development that is concerned with the social conditions that facilitate or hinder human flourishing. While applicable to many domains, the theory has been commonly used to understand what moves students to act and persist in educational settings. SDT focuses on the factors that influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which primarily involves the satisfaction of basic psychological needs.

Basic Psychological Needs

SDT posits that human motivation is guided by the need to fulfill basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to having a choice in one's own individual behaviors and feeling that those behaviors stem from individual volition rather than from external pressure or control. In educational contexts, students feel autonomous when they are given options, within a structure, about how to perform or present their work.

Competence refers to perceiving one's own behaviors or actions as effective and efficient. Students feel competent when they are able to track their progress in developing skills or an understanding of course material. This is often fostered when students receive clear feedback regarding their progression in the class.

Relatedness refers to feeling a sense of belonging, closeness, and support from others. In educational settings, relatedness is fostered when students feel connected, both intellectually and emotionally, to their peers and instructors in the class. This can often be accomplished through interactions that allow members of the class to get to know each other on a deeper, more personal level.

Continuum of Self-Determination

SDT also posits that motivation exists on a continuum. When an environment provides enough support for the satisfaction of the psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness, an individual may experience self-determined forms of motivation: intrinsic motivation, integration, and identification. Self-determined motivation occurs when there is an internal perceived locus of causality (i.e., internal factors are the main driving force for the behavior). Integration and identification are also grouped as autonomous extrinsic motivation as the behavior is driven by internal and volitional choice.

Intrinsic motivation, which is the most self-determined type of motivation, occurs when individuals naturally and spontaneously perform behaviors as a result of genuine interest and enjoyment.

Integrated regulation is when individuals identify the importance of a behavior, integrate this behavior into their self-concept, and pursue activities that align with this self-concept.

Identified regulation is where people identify and recognize the value of a behavior, which then drives their action.

When an environment does not provide enough support for the satisfaction of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, an individual may experience non-self-determined forms of motivation: introjection and external regulation. Introjection and external regulation are grouped as controlled extrinsic motivation because people enact these behaviors due to external or internal pressures.

Introjected regulation occurs when individuals are controlled by internalized consequences administered by the individual themselves, such as pride, shame, or guilt.

External regulation is when people's behaviors are controlled exclusively by external factors, such as rewards or punishments.

Finally, at the bottom of the continuum is amotivation, which is lowest form of motivation.

Amotivation exists when there is a complete lack of intention to behave and there is no sense of achievement or purpose when the behavior is performed.

Below is a figure depicting the continuum of self-determination taken from Lonsdale, Hodge, and Rose (2009).

Although having intrinsically motivated students would be the ultimate goal, it may not be a practical one within educational settings. That's because there are several tasks that are required of students to meet particular learning objectives that may not be inherently interesting or enjoyable. Instead, instructors can employ various strategies to satisfy students' basic psychological needs, which should move their level of motivation along the continuum, and hopefully lead to more self-determined forms of motivation, thus yielding the greatest rewards in terms of student academic outcomes.

Below are suggestions for how instructors can positively impact students' perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Strategies to Enhance Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness

Autonomy Strategies

Have students choose paper topics

Have students choose the medium with which they will present their work

Co-create rubrics with students (e.g., participation rubrics, assignment rubrics)

Have students choose the topics you will cover in a particular unit

Drop the lowest assessment or two (e.g., quizzes, exams, homework)

Have students identify preferred assignment deadlines

Gather mid-semester feedback and make changes based on student suggestions

Provide meaningful rationales for learning activities

Acknowledge students' feelings about the learning process or learning activities throughout the course

Competence Strategies

Set high but achievable learning objectives

Communicate to students that you believe they can meet your high expectations

Communicate clear expectations for each assignment (e.g., use rubrics)

Include multiple low-stakes assessments

Give students practice with feedback before assessments

Provide lots of early feedback to students

Have students provide peer feedback

Scaffold assignments

Praise student effort and hard work

Provide a safe environment for students to fail and then learn from their mistakes

Relatedness Strategies

Share personal anecdotes

Get to know students via small talk before/after class and during breaks

Require students to come to office hours (individually or in small groups)

Have students complete a survey where they share information about themselves

Use students' names (perhaps with the help of name tents)

Have students incorporate personal interests into their assignments

Share a meal with students or bring food to class

Incorporate group activities during class, and allow students to work with a variety of peers

Arrange formal study groups

Convey warmth, caring, and respect to students

Sources:

Lonsdale, C., Hodge, K., & Rose, E. (2009). Athlete burnout in elite sport: A self-determination perspective. Journal of Sports Sciences, 27, 785-795.

Niemiec, C. P., & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and Research in Education, 7, 133-144.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. New York: Guilford.

Additional Strategies for Motivating Students

Below are some additional research-based strategies for motivating students to learn.

Become a role model for student interest. Deliver your presentations with energy and enthusiasm. As a display of your motivation, your passion motivates your students. Make the course personal, showing why you are interested in the material.

Get to know your students. You will be able to better tailor your instruction to the students' concerns and backgrounds, and your personal interest in them will inspire their personal loyalty to you. Display a strong interest in students' learning and a faith in their abilities.

Use examples freely. Many students want to be shown why a concept or technique is useful before they want to study it further. Inform students about how your course prepares students for future opportunities.

Use a variety of student-active teaching activities. These activities directly engage students in the material and give them opportunities to achieve a level of mastery.

Teach by discovery. Students find it satisfying to reason through a problem and discover the underlying principle on their own.

Cooperative learning activities are particularly effective as they also provide positive social pressure.

Set realistic performance goals and help students achieve them by encouraging them to set their own reasonable goals. Design assignments that are appropriately challenging in view of the experience and aptitude of the class.

Place appropriate emphasis on testing and grading. Tests should be a means of showing what students have mastered, not what they have not. Avoid grading on the curve and give everyone the opportunity to achieve the highest standard and grades.

Be free with praise and constructive in criticism. Negative comments should pertain to particular performances, not the performer. Offer nonjudgmental feedback on students' work, stress opportunities to improve, look for ways to stimulate advancement, and avoid dividing students into sheep and goats.

Give students as much control over their own education as possible. Let students choose paper and project topics that interest them. Assess them in a variety of ways (tests, papers, projects, presentations, etc.) to give students more control over how they show their understanding to you. Give students options for how these assignments are weighted.

Sources:

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

DeLong, M., & Winter, D. (2002). Learning to teach and teaching to learn mathematics: Resources for professional development. Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America.

Nilson, L. (2016). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Chelsea Yarborough and Heather Fedesco Print Version Cite this guide: Yarborough, C. B., & Fedesco, H. N. (2020). Motivating students. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu//cft/guides-sub-pages/motivating-students/. Introduction Expectancy - Value - Cost Model ARCS Model of Instructional Design Self-Determination Theory Additional Strategies for Motivating Students Introduction Fostering student...

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Centre for Teaching Vanderbilt University

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Centre for Teaching Vanderbilt University

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By Lily Claiborne, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow
In the "Motivating Students" workshop on October 26, 2010, a group of grad students and postdocs discussed what, as teachers, we wished motivated students and what actually motivates them in practice. We established that, while extrinsic motivators (such as grades, parental approval, potential earnings of a career) are common and are the primary motivators for most students, they don't lead to deep learning and can actually diminish students' intrinsic interest in a subject and motivation to master it. Research suggests that intrinsic motivation is derived from four innate student desires, and satisfying these desires can lead to more intrinsic motivation in our students, resulting in deeper learning. These four desires are control, competence, connectedness, and sharing. Workshop participants came up with some innovative techniques to address these student desires and enhance motivation, including...

Facilitate a peer-editing session, where students review and edit one another's papers sometime before the final due date (competence, sharing)

Shape lessons and discussions around students' personal stories (control, connectedness, sharing)

Give students choice of topics and/or format for assignments (control)

Have students brainstorm ideas for projects or papers, and then put them all in one list, allowing students to then choose a topic for their project from the list (control, sharing)

Make sure students in a class know one another (connectedness)

Ask students what kinds of activities they think would help them learn best (control)

Participants also broke into working groups to try to address three particularly difficult challenges to motivating students:
Motivating Lectures
Participants decided that the challenges to motivating students during lectures stemmed mostly from the format of teachers talking and students listening. This can result in lectures that are boring, don't hold student attention, and don't result in deep learning. As tools to combat these issues, participants suggested having student present ideas in class on occasion so that students are doing some of the "lecturing." Participants also suggested that lectures that regularly engage the students by asking them questions and incorporating active learning can address issues of boredom and waivering attention. Setting an agenda at the beginning and asking students what they have learned at the end can motivate them to pay attention throughout so that they can successfully participate at the end of the lesson. This can also increase their learning, as they synthesize their new knowledge to share with the class.
Motivating Non-Majors
It was agreed that motivating non-majors in an introductory course can be challenging due to students' lack of intrinsic interest in the topic, resistant attitude to the course because it is required, misconceptions surrounding the lack of relevance of the topic to their lives or their goals, feelings of having little talent or skill in the field, and the demands of other courses that may take priority. To point out the relevance of any subject, participants suggested drawing parallels with various other fields, specifically those in which students are already interested. Helping students feel successful will also contribute to students' motivation in a course outside their comfort zone. This can be acheived by encouraging small steps and little improvements, having some flexibility while grading, providing good support for students from TAs and other students, providing ample background and introductory material for new concepts, and using plenty of positive reinforcement. Asking students what would be helpful to them can help them feel more motivated in a course where they feel like outsiders.
Assessing Motivation
If you take steps in your course to better motivate your students, then how can you tell whether you were successful? Participants decided that assessing whether students are motivated or how student motivation changes with time is inherently difficult because getting feedback, particularly honest feedback, on motivation is difficult. Can you trust a student's self-report about his or her motivation in a class? How can you gather information on student motivation when doing so isn't part of traditional assessment activities? Considering these difficulties, suggestions for assessing student motivation included getting anonymous feedback (often and in class), having independent meetings with students so that you can get to know them, and creating a comfortable atmostphere in the classroom that will encourage students to be honest with you when sharing about their motivations.
Image: "Aoraki Rappel," Dru!, Flickr (CC)
Tags: Student Motivation

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Ideas for Motivating Students. By Lily Claiborne, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow In the "Motivating Students" workshop on October 26, 2010, a group of grad students and postdocs discussed what, as teachers, we wished motivated students and what actually motivates them in practice.

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Interesting article. Tells us that students are most successful if they engage with course material over time, and are able to make meaningful connections between content (vs. just trying to memorize).

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There is little scientific support for this fashionable idea—and stronger evidence for other learning strategies

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Here are some thoughts on critical considerations.  Check out the audio below and this link:
Fast Forward to pages 7 and 8
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/childcare/HowLearningHappens.pdf

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Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves

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Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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How to Motivate Your Students: What Every Teacher Should Know but Doesn't - Online College Courses

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Whether you're a new teacher or an experienced one, try using these methods to motivate your students and to encourage them to live up to their true potential.

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Personal experience as a consumer: What went on behind the scenes to make that happen.

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Asking the right questions to harness student motivation

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Asking the right questions to harness student motivation

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I want to make a confession. For years, I have spoken at high school and university commencements and made the classic remarks others have made to students:

"Find your passion and pursue it."

"Go after your dreams, and don't let anyone deny you."

"Trust your heart and fulfill your purpose."

These clichés were what I really believed at the time. I wanted to help students figure out what they were supposed to do with their life through self-diagnosis. If they would only look inside, they could discover their calling in life.

It's a sort of self-determination I felt I should encourage in students; I wanted them to be ambitious, and I thought this was the right mindset to go after it.

Today-I no longer believe this.

Why This is Bad Advice

Too many students heard this message from parents, pastors or commencement speakers and somehow drew the conclusion: Wow! I can dream up anything I want to do, and if I try hard enough, I can do it. Hundreds of thousands began choosing majors in college that our society and economy just didn't need. For a while, the number one goal of college graduates was to be rich and famous. In one survey, students claimed they most wanted to be the "personal assistant to a celebrity."

As a result, students' job searches were autonomous and self-absorbed. They began with: What do I want, and what must I do to get it? Even if the search was altruistic, it was still ignited by self. In the words of David Brooks, it was first about self-investigation and ultimately about self-fulfillment. William Ernest Henry's famous poem, "Invictus," summarizes the sentiment: I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.

I believe this has left, perhaps, millions of students with grievances against our culture and their advisors. Why? It didn't work too well. They graduated only to find life wasn't about them-employers weren't interested in their self-fulfillment, and money was far too hard to come by in a sour economy.

A Lesson From the Past

During the dark days of World War II, Victor Frankl spent years in a Nazi ghetto and later a concentration camp. It was there he learned that life cannot be evaluated in simple terms of "self." Each of us individuals are part of a larger community, and our success must be measured in terms of that larger community, not in laying personal life plans. We are all part of history, a narrative into which we've been placed to contribute to the specific circumstances and challenges of our day.

For instance, Frankl spent most of his time in the concentration camp laying tracks for the railroad. This was not the life he had planned for himself. It was neither his passion, nor his dream. This left him with two choices: he could either get lost in depression over it, or he could choose to find meaning in his suffering by figuring out how best to contribute to his current circumstances.

"It did not really matter what we expected from life," he'd later write, "but rather what life expected from us." Frankl had been given an amazing intellectual and social opportunity to study human behavior under the most horrific conditions. He had the chance to share what he was learning with his fellow prisoners and, if he survived, with a larger population. It became invigorating to him. "Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs," he wrote. Frankl would tell suicidal prisoners that life had not stopped expecting things from them. Life "ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets before the individual."

A Different Set of Questions

So, as you work with students, may I suggest we make a shift in the questions we're asking? I am making this shift and finding the conversation more invigorating:

Stop Asking...

1. What do you want to major in?

2. What do you want out of life?

3. How much money can you make?

4. How can you achieve something great?

5. What do you possess inside?

6. What will make you happy?

Start Asking...

1. What problem do you want to solve?

2. What is life asking of you?

3. What do you have to give?

4. How can you add value in a given context?

5. What are the needs or opportunities around you?

6. What are you being summoned to do?

Our world is too broken and in need of repair for us to simply ask:

What do you want to major in during college?

What jobs pay well and can get you a nice house or car?

What will make you happy?

Happiness comes when I find a great "why" behind a career choice. As Frederick Nietzsche noted, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

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The Day I Stopped Asking Students the Wrong Questions

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I want to make a confession. For years, I have spoken at high school and university commencements and made the classic remarks others have made to students: "Find your passion and pursue it." "Go after your dreams, and don't let anyone deny you." "Trust your heart and fulfill your purpose."

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Refer to students as professionals. Resource depends on your field

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Use professional organizations, resources, guest speakers etc

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Use professional organizations, resources, guest speakers etc

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Following are some research-based strategies for motivating students to learn.

Become a role model for student interest. Deliver your presentations with energy and enthusiasm.  As a display of your motivation, your passion motivates your students.

Get to know your students. You will be able to better tailor your instruction to the students’ concerns and backgrounds, and your personal interest in them will inspire their personal loyalty to you. Display a strong interest in students’ learning and a faith in their abilities.

Use examples freely. Many students want to be shown why a concept or technique is useful before they want to study it further. Inform students about how your course prepares students for future opportunities.

Use a variety of student-active teaching activities. These activities directly engage students in the material and give them opportunities to achieve a level of mastery.

Teach by discovery.  Students find as satisfying as reasoning through a problem and discovering the underlying principle on their own.

Cooperative learning activities are particularly effective as they also provide positive social pressure.

Set realistic performance goals and help students achieve them by encouraging them to set their own reasonable goals. Design assignments that are appropriately challenging in view of the experience and aptitude of the class.

Place appropriate emphasis on testing and grading. Tests should be a means of showing what students have mastered, not what they have not. Avoid grading on the curve and give everyone the opportunity to achieve the highest standard and grades.

Be free with praise and constructive in criticism. Negative comments should pertain to particular performances, not the performer. Offer nonjudgmental feedback on students’ work, stress opportunities to improve, look for ways to stimulate advancement, and avoid dividing students into sheep and goats.

Give students as much control over their own education as possible. Let students choose paper and project topics that interest them. Assess them in a variety of ways (tests, papers, projects, presentations, etc.) to give students more control over how they show their understanding to you. Give students options for how these assignments are weighted.

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About half way down there is a specific area about teaching college students:
"Could a similar intervention also work for college students? A few studies suggest that the answer is yes."

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The Chronicle Review

It's not about how smart you are

noah berger for the chronicle review

Carol S. Dweck says that her graduate students here at Stanford University are hard-working, creative, and resilient in the face of failure. But she wouldn't call them smart.

Over the last two decades, Dweck has become one of the country's best-known research psychologists by documenting the follies associated with thinking and talking about intelligence as a fixed trait.

Most famously, Dweck and her collaborators have demonstrated that praising children for their intelligence can backfire. When young people's sense of self-worth is bound up in the idea that they are smart-a quality they come to understand as a genetic blessing from the sky-at least three bad things can happen. Some students become lazy, figuring that their smarts will bail them out in a pinch. Others conclude that the people who praise their intelligence are simply wrong, and decide that it isn't worth investing effort in homework. Still others might care intensely about school but withdraw from difficult tasks or tie themselves in knots of perfectionism. (To understand this third group, think of the Puritans: They did not believe they had any control over whether they were among God's elect, but they nonetheless searched endlessly for ways to display that they had been chosen, and they were terrified of any evidence that they were not.)

It is much wiser, Dweck says, to praise children for work and persistence. People nearly always perform better if they focus on things they can control, such as their effort, rather than things they cannot.

At the age of 63, Dweck wears an expression of perpetual amusement. She is petite and dressed in black, and after six years at Stanford her general gestalt is still more New York than California. (She was raised in Brooklyn, and she taught at Columbia University for 15 years before coming here in 2004.) Among her many small crusades is this one: She hates when people use "hard working" to signal faint praise in academic letters of recommendation.

"I'd like to change that culture," she says. "'Hard working' is what gets the job done. You just see that year after year. The students who thrive are not necessarily the ones who come in with the perfect scores. It's the ones who love what they're doing and go at it vigorously."

That's one tiny way in which Dweck's theories might change higher education. But she also has grander hopes. Colleges could improve their students' learning, she says, if they relentlessly encouraged them to think about their mental skills as malleable, rather than as properties fixed at birth. No more saying, "I can't major in chemistry because I'm just not wired for math."

Most of the evidence on this point comes from studies of younger students. Dweck herself spends a great deal of time these days acting as a consultant to public schools, especially middle schools. But she and others have also conducted several studies that suggest that college students, too, do better if they think of intelligence as flexible rather than frozen. In the next several years, Dweck hopes to develop a program that would train entering college students to adopt a "growth mindset," in regard to not only their intelligence but also their emotions.

The science here is not settled, however. Three recent studies have found that college students' beliefs about intelligence are not correlated with their academic performance-at least not in the straightforward way that Dweck's model proposes. The authors of those studies say they admire Dweck's work, but they are less hopeful than she is that college students' performance can be turned around with a simple intervention.

By her account, Dweck's own performance as a student was enthusiastic. When she arrived at Barnard College, she had a hard time settling on a major because she was enthralled by all of her courses.

"I loved everything," she says. "I loved sciences and I loved humanities. But ultimately I felt that in the humanities-you know, you're writing about things that already exist. But in the sciences you're discovering things that no one has known before. Ultimately I chose psychology because it seemed to combine science with things that I liked to think about. And I liked the idea that you could wonder about something, run an experiment, and have an answer a few months later."

What Dweck has wondered about for the last 40 years, more than any other single question, is how people cope with failure. In graduate school at Yale University, she became intrigued by Martin E.P. Seligman's model of "learned helplessness." In a famous series of experiments in the mid-1960s, Seligman and his colleague Steven F. Maier demonstrated that dogs that were subjected to random, uncontrollable electric shocks usually became helpless over time. That is, even if they were moved into an environment in which they could prevent the shocks by pressing a lever or doing some other trick, the dogs never learned to do so. The experience of random punishment had rendered these dogs passive, and immune to classical Pavlovian conditioning.

The Seligman experiments had a huge impact in psychology-but most of the early studies of learned helplessness in humans had to do with depression. Dweck went down a different road: She wondered if learned helplessness might interfere with students' academic performance.

To test that idea, Dweck asked a few dozen New Haven fifth graders to rearrange four colored blocks so that they matched the patterns shown on a set of cards. Such blocks are a staple of children's IQ tests, and they typically have two red sides, two white sides, and two sides that are diagonally split between red and white.

But in this case Dweck had rigged the game.

Each fifth grader was brought individually to a table with two amiable experimenters, whom we'll call Alice and Bob. The two experimenters alternated the presentation of the block problems according to a random sequence. For each of her problems, Alice gave the child a normal set of blocks. But Bob gave the child blocks with too many diagonally split sides-which meant that his problems were impossible to solve. Somewhat like the dogs in Seligman's experiments, Dweck's fifth graders were subjected to uncontrollable failure at random intervals.

Each child worked away at more than 30 of these problems-often solving Alice's, but never solving Bob's. The child had 20 seconds to do each problem, and he had some motivation to get them right. For each correctly solved problem, he was given a chip; with enough chips, he could choose from a pile of toys visible across the room.

At the end of the process came a twist. For the last two rounds, Bob quietly switched to a normal set of blocks and gave the child problems that he or she had successfully solved earlier in the experiment. (The patterns were rotated 90 degrees, so they may not have been immediately familiar to the child.)

Some of the children failed to solve these problems-or took much longer than usual to get them right-even though they had solved them correctly just moments earlier. These children seemed to have consciously or unconsciously persuaded themselves (not without reason) that they could never solve Bob's problems. Like Seligman's helpless dogs, they did not seem to notice or take advantage of the fact that their environment had become controllable. But other children did fine, solving Bob's last two problems with no apparent trouble.

It turned out that the children's performance on those last two problems was strongly predicted by their answers on a psychological questionnaire that Dweck had given them beforehand. The questionnaire, known as the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Scale, is designed to determine whether a person credits or blames his own behavior for his academic results, or whether he attributes those outcomes to external agents. ("The teacher had it in for me" versus "I didn't study hard enough." Or "the instructions weren't written clearly" versus "I didn't read the instructions carefully.")

The fifth graders whose answers had been at the individual-responsibility end of the scale tended to do well on Bob's last two questions. By contrast, those who said they credited or blamed others were the ones who behaved helplessly when Bob's questions suddenly became soluble.

The questionnaire, which was originally designed by other scholars in 1965, doesn't have right or wrong answers, exactly. Sometimes in life the teacher really does have it in for you; sometimes the instructions really aren't written clearly; sometimes the colored-block problems are rigged. But like many other psychologists, Dweck believes that on the whole, people do best if they believe in their own control over their behavior and their own responsibility for outcomes. Her colored-block experiment was significant because it demonstrated that children who attribute responsibility for their academic performance to others seem to be vulnerable to learned helplessness.

In the real world, outside of mildly sadistic experiments like Dweck's 1971 block study, how and why do some children acquire that kind of helplessness? In many cases, Dweck believes, it is because children grow up hearing parental chatter-"Smart girl!" and "You're so good at math!"-that conveys the idea that intelligence is a fixed, innate quality, and therefore that they ultimately don't have much control over their academic successes and failures.

In a landmark series of studies with Claudia M. Mueller during the 1990s, Dweck demonstrated that praising children for their intelligence, rather than for their effort, often leads them to give up when they encounter setbacks. Such children tend to become preoccupied with how their performance compares with that of their peers, rather than with finding new strategies to improve their own work.

"In the nineties, the self-esteem gurus were telling parents and teachers to praise children as lavishly and globally as possible," Dweck says. "But from my research going back 20 years, I knew that it was the children who were overly concerned with their intelligence-who were even trafficking in that concept-who were the vulnerable ones." That element was something that Dweck began to explore in the years after her colored-block study; in a 1978 experiment with Carol I. Diener, Dweck found that children who described their own memory or intelligence in fixed ways were much more likely to give up on a difficult pattern-identification task than otherwise-similar children who did not make such statements.

Dweck and several colleagues believe that they have developed an effective system to help middle-school students avoid that morass and to think of their intelligence as "incremental" rather than fixed. Dozens of public-school systems have signed up to train their students using a program created by Dweck and Lisa Sorich Blackwell, her former student.

Could a similar intervention also work for college students? A few studies suggest that the answer is yes.

The most famous of those, as it happens, was done at Stanford a few years before Dweck's arrival. In the late 1990s, Joshua Aronson, who now teaches psychology at New York University, and two colleagues adopted Dweck's model by asking Stanford students to write letters to local middle-school "pen pals" that encouraged the younger students to persist in their studies. They were encouraged to tell the middle schoolers things like, "Humans are capable of learning and mastering new things at any time in their lives."

The point of this, of course, was to alter the Stanford students' beliefs about intelligence and learning, not the middle schoolers'. Relative to members of a control group, these Stanford students earned higher grades three months later, and were more likely to report that they enjoyed academic work. The effects were especially strong among African-American students, who were overrepresented in the study.

But some other studies of college students have failed to support Dweck's model. In a 2003 study of 93 students at University College London, scholars did not find any relationship between students' academic performance and their beliefs about the nature of intelligence. A similar result has come out of research at Temple University, where two scholars are leading a large National Science Foundation-supported study of student performance in introductory biology and chemistry courses. In the first two semesters of that study, the scholars have found no connection between students' theories of intelligence and their grades.

"We wrote our research proposal thinking that this was a good, solid hypothesis," says Jennifer G. Cromley, an assistant professor of educational psychology at Temple. "So in some ways we're still grappling with these early results."

One potential factor is that Temple is a less-selective institution than the colleges where the best-known previous studies have taken place. So differences among the Temple students' beliefs about intelligence might be swamped, for example, by differences in their baseline knowledge about how to navigate through college life.

"We're doing long interviews that are trying to contextualize the students' experiences," says Cromley's research partner, Erin M. Horvat, an associate professor of urban education. "At Temple, you have kids who say, 'It takes me an hour and a half to get here.' 'I work until 4 a.m.' Those are things we have to keep in our consciousness. Not all of these students are being taken care of by their parents. Not all of them know to visit the professor during office hours. They don't all know how to manage the institutional culture."

A more fundamental challenge to Dweck's model came in a study published online last year in the journal Self and Identity. In laboratory experiments conducted at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, scholars found that students with "incremental" beliefs about intelligence do not always behave as optimally as Dweck and her colleagues suggest.

In the Michigan studies, college-age subjects were brought into a computer lab and told that they would take a difficult word-association test. (The test was in fact difficult: In one of the studies, the subjects got an average of 0.86 out of 10 questions correct.) The studies wondered whether students' beliefs about intelligence ("entity" versus "incremental," in Dweck's terms) would affect how long they practiced before taking the test, whether they chose to listen to distracting music while practicing, and how they would explain their low scores after taking the test.

The answer turned out to be: It depends. The Michigan studies divided the incremental theorists (that is, the students who implicitly believed that intelligence is malleable) into two groups: Those whose sense of self-worth was tied to academic performance and those who didn't care so much about school. The latter group-those whose egos were not deeply invested in schoolwork-behaved as Dweck would have predicted. But among students whose self-worth was tied to academic performance, incremental theorists behaved similarly to students with "fixed" beliefs about intelligence. They avoided practicing, and they "self-handicapped."

For example, in one version of the study, the subjects were given either an easy or a difficult sample question from the test before they practiced. If they saw a difficult sample question, the incremental theorists who cared a lot about how they performed academically were more likely than any other group to choose distracting music when they practiced-presumably because they could later blame that distraction for their expected bad performance.

"In some cases, having an incremental theory might actually lead to dysfunctional behavior," says Jennifer Crocker, a professor of psychology at Michigan and an author of the study. "I think Carol is a great scientist, but in her writing you sometimes get the sense that having an incremental theory is a panacea, and it really doesn't seem to be."

Altering students' beliefs about the nature of intelligence may not help much, Crocker says, if they do not also reduce their general ego-investment in schooling. "A glib way of putting it is to say, 'Get over yourself,'" Crocker says. "If you want to stop acting in self-defeating ways, then think about how your schoolwork will help people outside of yourself."

Dweck says she agrees that holding an incremental theory of intelligence, in and of itself, doesn't cure all academic ills. "We now have a much fuller understanding of the mediators of this entire process"-that is, how beliefs about intelligence lead students to choose particular learning goals or to react emotionally to failures and setbacks. Each of those points along the chain, Dweck says, is an opportunity for intervention.

"We can really focus on all of the nodes of the process," she says.

Dweck is now expanding her work on how beliefs about intelligence interact with anxieties about stereotypes among women and people of color. (To some degree, she is filling the shoes of Claude M. Steele, the theorist of "stereotype threat" who recently left Dweck's department to become provost of Columbia.) She and a colleague are studying how a "sense of belonging" contributes to students' willingness to persist in science majors at Stanford.

"We're about to embark on an intervention with Stanford freshmen where we teach them a growth mindset and how to put it into practice," she says. "We're going to try to include their implicit theories about emotion as well as intelligence. Because it's clear that if you have a fixed mindset and you're afraid that you might be failing, you're having all kinds of emotional reactions that could stand in your way."

David Glenn is a senior reporter for The Chronicle.

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The Chronicle Review It's not about how smart you are Carol S. Dweck says that her graduate students here at Stanford University are hard-working, creative, and resilient in the face of failure. But she wouldn't call them smart.

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Be a role model for your students

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We all know the struggle. We teach and teach and reteach and work with individuals or small-groups and, despite our efforts, that one student just doesn't get it. Or we try one behavior management or modification technique after another and just can't get the desired behavior from that student. Learning difficulties or emotional trauma are unfortunately the cause of issues like these all too often. However, many times the root of the problem may simply be that we are not adequately motivating our students. Effectively motivating your students cannot erase every problem, but it can be a solution or preventative to many problems that students and teachers experience in the classroom.

Of course, what motivates one student might not motivate another. Some students are intrinsically motivated. These are students that are motivated from something within. Intrinsically motivated students might simply have a deep desire to succeed and are, therefore, motivated to do well in all that they do. In some cases, intrinsic motivation comes from utilizing a topic that a student is particularly interested in. If students are interested in the topic, then they are intrinsically motivated to listen and learn. Other students are extrinsically motivated. These students need some outside factor to boost motivation. Grades are extrinsic motivators for some students. Rewards and praise can also be effective extrinsic motivators. Regardless of the kind of motivator that students respond to, there are techniques that can be used to increase motivation for both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated students.

Establish Clear Goals and Expectations

First of all, we cannot expect high motivation if students do not fully understand the ultimate goal. Therefore, it is critically important that at the beginning of every lesson or unit teachers let students know exactly what they will be expected to do or know at the end. It also helps if there is a life application involved. For example, at the end of a money unit, you would expect students to be able to add various amounts of money. By providing a class store with small items to buy if they are able to accurately add the amounts of money, they are provided the opportunity to display that knowledge, and the goal/expectation provided motivation for their learning.

Focus on Growth

Another way to provide motivation for students is to establish and maintain a growth mindset. The ultimate level for the student's grade-level or age may be too overwhelming and seem unachievable. If you set small, achievable goals for the students and focus on whether or not the student has made strides toward that goal, students see more successes and are able to stay motivated throughout the process. Celebrate the growth along the way, no matter how small!

Rewards and Recognition

Some students are greatly motivated by rewards and/or recognition. One very commonly used method is to set up a reward system in your room. You can set rewards for the whole class, but students tend to stay more motivated if the rewards are based on individual growth and/or achievement. Types of rewards will vary based on the age of the students, but students can be rewarded for consistently good behavior, high achievement, or growth. A small chart can be placed on each student's desk to keep track of the positive behaviors you would like to reward. Again, this could be for all students or you can target the ones that are really struggling with motivation.

While tangible rewards can be effective, I find that recognition and praise may be even more so. Many students long for and respond to praise and recognition. By simply acknowledging accomplishments, some students are greatly motivated to keep up the good work.

Students' Interests

This is a method that will dip into that goldmine of intrinsic motivation. When learning is centered on students' interests, the motivation is already there. So maybe find out a favorite hobby of that student who struggles with motivation, and teach a unit incorporating that somehow. Of course, this may not always be possible, but you might be surprised at how far a little peak of interest can go. If you are teaching language arts, no problem. Find a book on the topic and spark that interest. Other areas may not be quite as easy, but where there is a will, there is a way. I had a student a few years ago that struggled terribly in math. He also completely lacked motivation to improve. This same student, at a very young age, could repair car motors and even take some of the machinery apart and put it back together. So, I incorporated cars as much as possible. Every word problem was about a car, tractor, or engine. When we used manipulatives, we used cars. He looked forward to math every day!

Develop Positive, Meaningful Relationships with Your Students

All of the above listed ideas are great and can go a long way to motivate students. However, there is no substitute, when it comes to motivation, for developing meaningful relationships with your students. To motivate your students you must know what makes them tick. How can you know that without really getting to know and understand them?

Students can also be motivated simply by the fact that they know you care for them and want them to succeed. When they know they are loved, they love you in return. When they love you, they love school. When they love school, they want to be there. When they want to be there, they are motivated to do their best! Talk to your students. Invest in them. Love them. This is the greatest motivator of all!

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How to Motivate Students in the Classroom - TeachHUB

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We all know the struggle. We teach and teach and reteach and work with individuals or small-groups and, despite our efforts, that one student just doesn't get it. Or we try one behavior management or modification technique after another and just can't get the desired behavior from that student.

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Stay connected via Facebook (personal; alumni page), LinkedIn, email, phone etc.

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This can be a way to connect with students. Again... know your audience!

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Brené Brown studies human connection -- our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share.

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I just met a junior from Miami University in Ohio. He was like so many others I meet: full of potential, but lacking clear ambition about a career. It's not so much because he lacks a vision; it's because he has twenty visions for his future, and it has paralyzed him from taking clear steps toward his future. Others, who act like him on the outside, lack motivation for other reasons. Carnegie Mellon University published the results of a study revealing why a disproportionate amount of college students today aren't as motivated as they need to be. The top reasons were:

Students see little value in the course or its content.

Students do not believe that their efforts will improve their performance.

Students are demotivated by the structure and allocation of rewards.

Students do not perceive the classroom climate as supportive.

Students have other priorities that compete for their time and attention.

Individual students may suffer from physical, mental, or other personal problems that affect motivation.

Sadly, the number of unmotivated students is rising. In a world of unprecedented opportunity and connection-wouldn't you think we'd have the most motivated generation of kids in the history of mankind? We've pushed them to succeed at every level: at school, in sports, and every other extracurricular activity.

But alas, many students are perceived as "unmotivated."

Student Achievement vs. Motivation

A series of papers from the Center of Educations Policy (CEP) at George Washington University reveals that educators have focused far more on student achievement-i.e. getting test scores up-than on student motivation. Regrettably, this pushes schools to only measure test scores, and, hence, do whatever it takes to get those scores up-even if that means cheating. (Inflated scores have been posted dozens of times over the years in K-12 education).

Let's face it: we're pragmatic. Our strategies to boost student achievement don't address the real problems of their disengagement. As Forbes noted, "Upwards of 40 percent of high school students are chronically disengaged from school, according to a 2003 National Research Council report on motivation."

The decline in motivation is a pressing and tangible problem.

So what's the solution? I believe instead of student achievement, we should target student motivation. If they are motivated, they should naturally achieve. An inspired student, passionate about what he or she is learning, is pushed from the inside out, not vice versa. Plus, I'm not sure teachers can compete with Instagram, YouTube or Snapchat when it comes to engaging students. We don't have the budgets to compete with such sources of entertainment. We've got to dig deeper into the core of what drives people-especially young people-to take initiative.

Six Levels of Motivation in Students

Recently, I wrote an article about changing the questions we ask students about their future. When we try to help them identify what they want to do with their life, I believe we've unwittingly asked them some pretty self-absorbed questions. Pause and think about the students you know who ARE motivated. I believe the following levels of motivation are in effect for those students. Let's take a look:
1. I get to do something.
The best learning doesn't take place while sitting in a classroom. Motivation rises in students when we enable them to get up and do something with their hands and minds. They must apply their knowledge. We truly learn what we do.
2. I get to do something interesting to me.
Next, students engage more deeply when their "doing" intersects with an area of curiosity. The good news is-we can enable this curiosity when we teach well. Steve Jobs said, "The only way to do good work is to love what you do." It must be kindled.
3. I get to do something interesting, using my gifts.
The third level of motivation involves empowering students to utilize their specific strengths. Don Clifton wrote, "When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp."
4. I get to do something interesting, using my gifts with people I enjoy.
Because humans are social beings, learning can be accelerated by social integration. Growing in a community is deeply satisfying. In short, we tend to like people who like us and who are like us. We learn best when friends make us better.
5. I get to do something interesting, using my gifts with people I enjoy, that solves a problem.
The element of problem solving further engages and motivates students. We are, in our best nature, problem solvers. It's what good leaders do; it's what engages people the most. It's even better when the problem is real, not hypothetical.
6. I get to do something interesting, using my gifts with people I enjoy, that solves a problem regarding something that matters.
The ultimate engagement surfaces when the problem is important. For years, I've believed that students want to do something that's very important and almost impossible. The larger the challenge, the higher the engagement. People are better when the stakes are high.

Although our students are still maturing, adding any or all of these elements above naturally works to inspire them internally rather than nag them externally. When we practice them well, author Donald Clifton reminds us we will see a signal in our students: They will anticipate it, and will be asking, "When can I do this again?"

Isn't this the dream of every educator?

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I just met a junior from Miami University in Ohio. He was like so many others I meet: full of potential, but lacking clear ambition about a career. It's not so much because he lacks a vision; it's because he has twenty visions for his future, and it has paralyzed him from taking clear steps toward his future.

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Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, 3rd Edition

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Teaching at Its Best This third edition of the best-selling handbook offers faculty at all levels an essential toolbox of hundreds of practical teaching techniques, formats, classroom activities, and exercises, all of which can be implemented immediately.

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Journal article - qualitative student of different ways to motivate stud3nts

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"Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

What keeps us from starting that side project? Or from building that company? What keeps us making excuses for why we can't begin?

Consumer mindset

We are all consumers. We spend our days reading, listening, eating, and buying. We buy things we don't need to make us happy. A constant consumption of newer and better things. We work to afford the newest clothes, the nice car, the expensive dinner out.

But none of this will add happiness to our lives. True happiness comes from helping others - from carving out our own path. It comes from the confidence gained by knowing that you can succeed in your dream.

As long as you remain only a consumer you will not have the fulfillment you desire. A consumer can never get enough. They can never be truly happy. They will always look at the world through the lens of what they can get from it, instead of what they can give to it.

Producer Mindset

Producers, on the other hand, strive to make something valuable to others. They receive their payment not only monetarily, but through the confidence of self that they don't require anyone else to survive in this world.

It's not as hard as you might think. You don't have to have a large fabrication shop selling millions of items.

You could simply start a blog.

You could put out information that can help others going through the same experiences you've gone through. It can be free.

The producer mindset allows you to view the world through the opposite lens. This lens will keep you striving to find new ways to provide value and allows you to see how others are doing the same.

How to start

Most of us get stuck in the consumer mindset because we fear change. We never start because we feel as though we don't deserve our goals, or that we'll be unable to achieve them.

At some point you need to say "I'm going to do this. Forget what everyone else says or thinks. I'm going to try."

That first step is hard. But it's not as big as you imagine.

We all feel as though everyone is watching, waiting for us to fail. But that's absolutely not the case.

Take comfort in the fact that everyone else is so consumed with themselves that they are most likely paying no attention to you at all.

You can try. You can fail. It won't be the end of the world. In fact, it really won't be that bad at all.

Learn from your mistakes and continue to improve.

Start. Make the mindset switch today. Once you start viewing the world as a producer, it will look completely different to you. Doors will start to open that you never saw before and you can finally begin to live the life of your dreams.

Final Thoughts

While it is impossible not to be a consumer, don't succumb to the thought that that's all you are or have to be. Use your hobbies and interests to create something for others. Even if you don't receive monetary gains from it, producing something has incredible psychological benefits.

Over the past decade psychologists have studied the effects of performing creative acts on everything from mood enhancement to treatments for diseases. It is now a recommended part of any wellness routine.

Do it today. Decide that you will no longer sit on the sidelines. Instead become an active participant in the game of life. You never know who could be waiting for you to come along and make a difference.

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Consumer vs. Producer- A Change in Mindset That Will Change Your Life

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"Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich." - Ralph Waldo Emerson What keeps us from starting that side project? Or from building that company? What keeps us making excuses for why we can't begin? We are all consumers.

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Application of a mentor-ship initiative by pairing a student with another whom performs the required tasks- they do it because the genuinely want to do it !

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Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation come from very different places. Intrinsic motivation is a natural inherent motivator. For instance we do something because we genuinely want to, it makes us happy, or it is exciting to us. Intrinsic motivation is spontaneous, meaning there doesn't need to be an outside factor that pushes a us to do something. An example of intrinsic motivation would be someone who plays tennis because they enjoy it or someone who volunteers because helping others is satisfying.

Extrinsic motivation is dependent on external factors. Environmental incentives coerce someone to do something they may otherwise not do. For instance, a workplace challenge with a monetary reward may push someone to work harder for the duration of the challenge. The reverse is true as well. Environmental consequences motivate people who want to avoid an otherwise negative outcome. If he or she doesn't do their work they will get fired. Extrinsic motivation asks, "What's in it for me?" or "What will I get if I do that?".

Although both forms of motivation work, extrinsic motivation is temporary. So, it depends on what you want from your employees. Is what you are asking a short-term request, one that afterward you are good with your staff going back to their previous behaviors? Or would you prefer to have a more long-term change in behavior?

Creating an environment that fosters intrinsic motivation can be tricky; however, is not impossible. Remember, intrinsic motivation happens when a person wants to do something. So the questions is, how do we make our employees want to work?

1. Create Teams. Not just any team, but a team of people who have similar goals, personalities, and schedules. People who not only work well together but might become friends even outside of work. Data shows that people are more satisfied in their jobs when they have a friend at work. Teams make work more fun and also provide a launch pad for great ideas.

2. Provide Education and Training Opportunities. There is nothing worse than feeling like you are not good at your job. If you know how to do something well, you are more likely to enjoy doing it. Most people enjoy learning on some level. Make sure your employees have the opportunity to grow and learn. After all, education is one of the top drivers for employee satisfaction according Best Places to Work and Gallop. Not only will this investment make work more enjoyable for your employees but they will likely produce higher quality work and be more innovative and creative.

3. Leverage a Mentor Program. 71% of Fortune 500 Companies offer corporate mentoring programs to improve employee retention and workforce productivity. Mentor programs provide self-development as well as career development. People enjoy learning from their peers and mentors enjoy sharing their knowledge.

4. Provide an Intrinsic Environment. Each of the above tools for driving intrinsic motivation is part of creating an environment that naturally fosters an innate response to a psychological need- which is to work hard and produce quality work. Just by implementing these three motivational strategies you can provide an environment that intrinsically changes your employees behaviors for the long-term.

What do you want for your employees?

www.RivalHealth.com

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4 Ways to Create an Intrinsically Motivated Environment in the Workplace

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Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation come from very different places. Intrinsic motivation is a natural inherent motivator. For instance we do something because we genuinely want to, it makes us happy, or it is exciting to us. Intrinsic motivation is spontaneous, meaning there doesn't need to be an outside factor that pushes a us to do something.

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Chapter from the book “Helping Students Motivate Themselves”

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I've just learned that an eBook Version (PDF) of my new book, "Helping Students Motivate Themselves" is now available. The Eye on Education site for the book lists three versions: the print book, the eBook, and the print and eBook bundle option.

In the near future, the book will also be available in ePub and Mobi formats for reading on mobile devices like the Kindle and Nook. Purchasers of the PDF will be granted permission to download the ePub and Mobi versions at no extra charge when they are available.

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eBook Version of "Helping Students Motivate Themselves" Now Available

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I've just learned that an eBook Version (PDF) of my new book, "Helping Students Motivate Themselves" is now available. The Eye on Education site for the book lists three versions: the print book, the eBook, and the print and eBook bundle option.

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Again... is it motivation or learning environments? Motivation is intrinsic, often set long before higher education. So if we focus on our environment we may have more success. What do you think?

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by Terry Heick
For in-person professional development from TeachThought on how to create an effective learning environment in your classroom or school, contact us today.
Wherever we are, we'd all like to think our classrooms are 'intellectually active' places. Progressive learning(like our 21st Century Model, for example) environments. Highly-effective and conducive to student-centered learning.

But what does that mean?

The reality is, there is no single answer because teaching and learning are awkward to consider as single events or individual 'things.' This is all a bunch of rhetoric until we put on our white coats and study it under a microscope, at which point abstractions like curiosity, authenticity, self-knowledge, and affection will be hard to pin down.

So we put together one take on the characteristics of a highly effective classroom. They can act as a kind of criteria to measure your own against-see if you notice a pattern.

10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment
1. The students ask the questions-good questions
This is not a feel-good implication, but really crucial for the whole learning process to work.

The role of curiosity has been studied (and perhaps under-studied and under-appreciated), but suffice to say that if a learner enters any learning activity with little to no natural curiosity, prospects for meaningful interaction with texts, media, and specific tasks are bleak. (Interested in how to kill learner curiosity in 12 easy steps?)
2. Questions are valued over answers 3. Ideas come from a divergent sources
Many teachers force students to ask questions at the outset of units or lessons, often to no avail. Cliché questions that reflect little understanding of the content can discourage teachers from 'allowing' them. But the fact remains-if students can't ask great questions-even as young as elementary school-something, somewhere is unplugged.
4. A variety of learning models are used 5. Classroom learning 'empties' into a connected community
Questions are more important than answers. So it makes sense that if good questions should lead the learning, there would be value placed on these questions. And that means adding currency whenever possible-grades (questions as assessment!), credit (give them points-they love points), creative curation (writing as a kind of graffiti on large post-it pages on the classroom walls), or simply praise and honest respect. See if you don't notice a change.

Ideas for lessons, reading, tests, and projects-the fiber of formal learning-should come from a variety of sources. If they all come from narrow slivers of resources, you're at risk of being pulled way off in one direction (that may or may not be good). An alternative? Consider sources like professional and cultural mentors, the community, content experts outside of education, and even the students themselves. Huge shift in credibility.
6. Learning is personalized by a variety of criteria
And when these sources disagree with one another, use that as an endlessly 'teachable moment,' because that's what the real world is like.
7. Assessment is persistent, authentic, transparent, and never punitive
Inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, direct instruction, peer-to-peer learning, school-to-school, eLearning, Mobile learning, the flipped classroom, and on and on-the possibilities are endless. Chances are, none are incredible enough to suit every bit of content, curriculum, and learner diversity in your classroom. A characteristic of a highly-effective classroom, then, is diversity here, which also has the side-effect of improving your long-term capacity as an educator.
8. Criteria for success is balanced and transparent. 9. Learning habits are constantly modeled
In a highly-effective learning environment, learning doesn't need to be radically repackaged to make sense in the 'real world,' but starts and ends there.
10. There are constant opportunities for practice
As great as it sounds for learners to reflect on Shakespeare to better understand their Uncle Eddie-and they might-depending on that kind of radical transfer to happen entirely in the minds of the learners by design may not be the best idea. Plan on this kind of transfer from the beginning.
10 Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment
It has to leave the classroom because they do.

Personalized learning is likely the future, but for now, the onus for routing students is almost entirely on the shoulders of the classroom teacher. This makes personalization-and even consistent differentiation-a challenge. One response is to personalize learning-to whatever extent you plan for-by a variety of criteria-not just assessment results or reading level, but interest, readiness-for-content, and others as well.

Then, as you adjust pace, entry points, and rigor accordingly, you'll have a better chance of having uncovered what the learners truly 'need.'

Assessment is just an (often ham-fisted) attempt to get at what a learner understands. The more infrequent, clinical, murky, or threatening it is, the more you're going to separate the 'good students' from the 'good thinkers.' And the 'clinical' idea has less to do with the format of the test, and more to do with the tone and emotion of the classroom in general. Why are students being tested? What's in it for them, and their future opportunities to improve?

And feedback is quick even when the 'grading' may not be.

Students should not have to guess what 'success' in a highly-effective classroom looks like. It should also not be entirely weighted on 'participation,' assessment results, attitude, or other individual factors, but rather meaningfully melted into a cohesive framework that makes sense-not to you, your colleagues, or the expert book on your shelf, but the students themselves.

Cognitive, meta-cognitive, and behavioral 'good stuff' is constantly modeled. Curiosity, persistence, flexibility, priority, creativity, collaboration, revision, and even the classic Habits of Mind are all great places to start. So often what students learn from those around them is less directly didactic, and more indirect and observational.

Monkey see, monkey do.

Old thinking is revisited. Old errors are reflected on. Complex ideas are re-approached from new angles. Divergent concepts are contrasted. Bloom's taxonomy is constantly traveled up and down, from the simple to the complex in an effort to maximize a student's opportunities to learn-and demonstrate understanding-of content.

For professional development around this or related ideas in education, contact us.

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The Characteristics Of A Highly Effective Learning Environment

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by Terry Heick For in-person professional development from TeachThought on how to create an effective learning environment in your classroom or school, contact us today. Wherever we are, we'd all like to think our classrooms are 'intellectually active' places. Progressive learning(like our 21st Century Model , for example) environments.

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Let's work together now and for the future. We created an Instagram group called We Are Motivation Mentors. Let's all share what motivates our students! Get students involved too!
Join us!

https://www.instagram.com/wearemotivatio/

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Video the keys to success created Angela Duckworth

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Video the keys to success created Angela Duckworth

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I can share with my students turban first week of class

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Notes Continued OPEN SPACES