My students aren’t motivated – how can I help them?
This page was written and compiled by Karin Kirk, SERC, and contains a summary of motivation research and pertinent references.
Teachers have a lot to do with their students’ motivational level. A student may arrive in class with a certain degree of motivation. But the teacher’s behavior and teaching style, the structure of the course, the nature of the assignments and informal interactions with students all have a large effect on student motivation. We may have heard the utterance, “my students are so unmotivated!” and the good news is that there’s a lot that we can do to change that.
“Research has shown that good everyday teaching practices can do more to counter student apathy than special efforts to attack motivation directly.”
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
Educational psychology has identified two basic classifications of motivation – intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation arises from a desire to learn a topic due to its inherent interests, for self-fulfillment, enjoyment and to achieve a mastery of the subject. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation is motivation to perform and succeed for the sake of accomplishing a specific result or outcome. Students who are very grade-oriented are extrinsically motivated, whereas students who seem to truly embrace their work and take a genuine interest in it are intrinsically motivated.
Motivating Students
This chapter from the book Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis (Jossey-Bass Publishers: San Francisco, 1993) is a great place to start for ideas and tips about increasing student motivation in your classes. The author presents a handy distillation of research on motivation and uses examples and anecdotes that bring this material to life. In addition to general strategies, this chapter addresses successful instructional behaviors, how to structure a course to motivate students, de-emphasizing grades and responding with other types of feedback to students, and tips to encourage students to complete assigned readings. A reference list points the way to more specific information.
Excerpts from this chapter:
- Give frequent, early, positive feedback that supports students’ beliefs that they can do well.
- Ensure opportunities for students’ success by assigning tasks that are neither too easy nor too difficult.
- Help students find personal meaning and value in the material.
- Create an atmosphere that is open and positive.
- Help students feel that they are valued members of a learning community.
Motivating Students – from the Vanderbilt Center for teaching (more info)
This website contains a quick and useful primer on many of the important topics in student motivation. Topics include intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the effect of learning style on motivation and strategies for motivating your students.
Here are some recurring themes about student motivation, drawn from the educational literature
“Empirical studies have shown that the quality of teacher-student relationships tend to decline after students enter junior high school and worsen thereafter.”
Make it real
In order to foster intrinsic motivation, try to create learning activities that are based on topics that are relevant to your students’ lives. Strategies include using local examples, teaching with events in the news, using pop culture technology (iPods, cell phones, YouTube videos) to teach, or connecting the subject with your students’ culture, outside interests or social lives. ([Brozo, 2005]; McMahon and Kelly, 1996)
(to be continued)
Source: https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/affective/motivation.html
Editor: Michael R. Clarke
