for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024
The Problem
A core element of a well-managed, productive, and engaged classroom is well-motivated students. There are, according to my classes, two kinds of motivation: intrinsic motivation – wanting to do the thing for the sake of doing the thing, because the thing is inherently desirable (also called, in the literature, autonomous motivation) – and extrinsic motivation – willingness to do the thing for a desired external reward or to avoid an undesired external consequence (also called controlled motivation).
A student’s intrinsic motivation generally has more effect on their engagement, productivity, self-efficacy, and generally doing the thing; their extrinsic motivation has less effect, to the point sometimes of having virtually no significant effect at all.
The core conundrum that arises is this: the forms of leverage available to teachers work almost exclusively on students’ extrinsic motivation and hardly at all on their intrinsic motivation. How do we, as teachers, square this circle? What tools are available to us to increase intrinsic motivation, or, failing that, at least to make extrinsic motivation more effective?
What Is Motivation?
It’s more complicated than the above-described two-factor schema, of course – “high-school students possess complex motivational characteristics” (Xie, Vongkulluksn, Cheng, & Jiang, 2022); “Achievement motivation is not a single construct but rather subsumes a variety of different constructs like ability self-concepts, task values, goals, and achievement motives” (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).
The aspects of motivation are more finely divided out by Kosovich et al. (2015): assessment of ability to do a thing – i.e. whether one can do a thing now (ability) and whether one will be able to do the thing in the future (expectancy) – is termed expectancy; assessment of value expected to be derived from the the thing can be split out into intrinsic value (the thing is inherently enjoyable), utility value (the thing can help achieve other short- or long-term goals), and attainment value (the thing can affirm an important aspect of one’s identity); cost reflects any negative aspect of doing the thing, e.g. time and/or effort required, opportunity cost, boredom, or negative psychological states induced by struggling or failing at the thing. Expectancy and value are positively correlated with one another, and with positive educational outcomes; cost is negatively correlated with all three things (Kosovich, Hulleman, Barron, & Getty, 2015).
It appears that classroom motivation is influenced by at least five factors: the learner, the educator, the course content, the teaching method, and the learning environment. (Kong, 2021)
The Impact of Motivation on Learning
Student interest in education has a positive effect on learning: “It is extensively approved that learners who are actively participating in the learning progression and take interest in their academic education are more likely to achieve higher levels of learning.” (Kong, 2021)
As a subset of that, it is pretty consistent that student motivation correlates with academic outcomes – highly motivated students tend to be highly successful in school (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).
As a subset of that, high intrinsic motivation is strongly correlated with student success. According to Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde (2020),
high-quality learning can only be achieved if the learner experiences a sense of self-determination. Self-determined learning (e.g. based upon intrinsic motivation) leads to a sense of well-being and contentment during the learning activity, a higher degree of learner engagement, and better performance outcomes. By contrast, learning processes that learners perceive as being controlled by others are connected to less contentment, less engagement, and a relatively low level of performance. (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020)
This reiterates the problem: intrinsically motivated students are more equipped to learn and to succeed at learning than extrinsically motivated students.
Techniques for Already Motivated Students
When students are already intrinsically motivated, clear and comprehensible instruction improves student outcomes relative to muddled or unclear instruction – but it has no significant effect on unmotivated students. (Bolkan, Goodboy, & Kelsey, 2016)
Similarly, when content and lessons are ‘gamified’, using principles of game design, it can increase learning… but primarily among students who are already intrinsically motivated. “[I]t is not a simple ‘gamification increases engagement’ relationship. Gamification impacts students with different types of motivation differently. […] it is particularly effective for students who are intrinsically motivated, particularly either by a motivation to know or a motivation towards stimulation. […] Overall, the results suggest that gamified learning interventions have a larger impact on students who are intrinsically motivated.” (Buckley & Doyle, 2016) Thus, gamification, while potentially good practice, doesn’t much help to improve intrinsic motivation.
Relevance of Material
Johansen, Eliassen, and Jeno establish that when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases (Johansen, Eliassen, & Jeno, 2023). This seems straightforward, but in tension with the student’s interests are the texts the curriculum demands be covered – which the teacher does not necessarily set themselves – and the interests of every other student – even assuming a teacher who can bring themselves to be interested enough in subject matter that interests any given student to plan lessons about it.
The fact that choice of content influences student motivation – when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases – seems, prima facie, challenging to use in the classroom. The curriculum may call for specific texts, with the teacher having limited control over it; a text that interests one student may hold no interest for another student; and a text that interests many students may hold no interest for the teacher, and it is, of course, challenging for a teacher to devise compelling lesson plans for content that is uninteresting to themselves – I find myself able to find a shared interest or two with most individual Gen Z students these days, but what tends to interest most of them – sports, dance TikTok, rap music, etc. – is usually difficult for me to bring myself to share. Still, I can usually count on a fair degree of success when using pop music for an anticipatory set.
One good solution to this, of course, is a decentralized inquiry-learning-based curriculum where each student pursues their own content interests, as propounded at length in the Buffalo State English Education program. This doesn’t help me as much if I end up in a position where I have no influence over the curriculum, though aspects of decentralized inquiry learning can be deployed even in the absence of curricular control.
Teaching Style
According to Zou et al.,
teachers' motivating styles can be divided into two orientations: controlling and autonomy‐supporting. The controlling motivating style is one in which teachers exert pressure on students to think, experience, or behave in a particular way, while the autonomy‐supporting motivating style is one in which teachers use noncontrolling methods to reduce pressure on students, and support students' autonomous development. […] Autonomy‐supporting classroom activities can improve students' perception of classroom teaching and can increase students' motivation and learning ability. […] Particularly, as for student psychological needs, experts agreed on the destructive effect of yelling, unfair punishments, abusive language, and criticism of fixed qualities, while the benefits of helping students find ways of monitoring their own progress and empathy for students. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023)
The obvious conclusion for a teacher to draw is that they should teach autonomy-supportingly, not controllingly, and definitely without yelling at, screaming at, ranting at, verbally abusing, punishing unfairly, or criticizing fixed qualities of students.
Juxtaposing good and bad and very bad methods of teaching in this way could lead to a misapprehension: so long as I’m not screaming at the students, I’m fine, right? Wrong! Students do need to, ideally, be supported and given tools to succeed, not just not yelled at.
Unfulfilled basic psychological needs, like perception of autonomy, perception of competence, and perception of relatedness, can negatively affect motivation (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020). “[W]hen students feel controlled, their intrinsic motivation is weakened, while their extrinsic motivation is strengthened.” (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023) Conversely, fulfilling these psychological needs can positively affect motivation:
To enable students to experience autonomy, competence and relatedness, a context should be created in which students’ actions result in the desired outcomes […] this means that students are provided with tasks […] that help them to reach the learning objectives […] By doing so, students get the opportunity to determine their actions (autonomy) and be effective (experience competence). […A] teacher can create the right conditions by providing appropriate help to students. Help contains the provision of resources to obtain the learning objectives, and information on how to apply those resources, like strategy explanations and meta-cognitive or self-regulatory suggestions. Providing help to students will empower them to act autonomously and effectively (experiencing competence). Moreover, as they experience that the teacher cares about them, it contributes to students’ feelings of relatedness. Feedback that provides information on how to proceed […] has proven to be effective. […] Teacher classroom practice in which constructive feedback [i]s provided [i]s associated with higher student perceptions of autonomy and competence. (Leenknecht, et al., 2021)
Other supports for motivation include: providing choices; taking student preferences and interests into account; explaining a rationale of why the material is important; giving opportunities for students to ask questions. Meanwhile, use of uninteresting activities can thwart motivation. (Patall, et al., 2018)
Teacher-Student Relationship
Much of the academic literature suggests that the teacher-student relationship mediates student motivation, making it a key to teaching, in this matter as it is in so many matters. On a basic level, it contributes towards the student’s need for relatedness, as mentioned above.
Zou, et al. (2024), among others, have found that the teacher’s intrinsic motivation for teaching correlated strongly with their students’ intrinsic motivation for learning, with the arrow of causation pointing from the former to the latter.
Students who believe that teachers are intrinsically motivated to teach are more willing to explore new skills and learn more than students who believe that teachers are extrinsically motivated to teach […] a teacher's motives for engaging in instruction can provide cues related to teachers' displays of positive affect and autonomy supportiveness, which can provide contextual cues that positively influence motivational orientations of students. Additionally, teachers' own motivating style and personality traits that involve control have been found to lead to their tendency to adopt a controlling motivating style. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023).
Henry & Thorsen (2021) finds self-disclosure – teachers telling students about themselves – can improve teacher-student student relationship and increases student motivation:
While some strongly-endorsed reasons are instrumental, and relate to the content of learning, for example clarifying learning materials and providing real-world examples, other purposes are relational and aimed at developing positive teacher–student relationships and creating a comfortable classroom environment. Generally, students are aware of teachers’ self-disclosures and recognize their value in creating a climate conducive to communication. Students often see beyond the personal stories teachers tell, interpreting their self-disclosures as attempts to be honest and open about themselves, to make personal connections, and to create an open and positive learning environment. (Henry & Thorsen, 2021)
Henry & Thorsen are, to be sure, looking at ENL teachers in Sweden, but this seems like a finding that could plausibly be consistent between disciplines and across oceans.
Impact on My Teaching
These findings reinforce the understanding that teacher-student relationship is paramount and fundamental in virtually every aspect of teaching. I shall henceforth redouble my efforts to quickly learn every student’s name and general interests and attempt to make connections by being authentic and (within reason) open about myself.
Luckily for my students, my motivation for teaching is largely intrinsic, which should correlate with them ending up intrinsically motivated. I enjoy teaching, I enjoy it for its own sake as well as believing it is inherently a good thing, and the motivation of money is, while not entirely unimportant, secondary.
Moreover, my teaching style tends not to be very controlling, though I could stand to do better at encouraging and helping students to autonomy.
Works Cited
Bolkan, S., Goodboy, A. K., & Kelsey, D. M. (2016, April 2). Instructor Clarity and Student Motivation: Academic Performance as A Product of Students’ Ability and Motivation to Process Instructional Material. Communication Education, 65(2), 129-148. doi:10.1080/03634523.2015.1079329
Buckley, P., & Doyle, E. (2016, August 17). Gamification and student motivation. Interactive Learning Environments, 24(6), 1162-1175. doi:10.1080/10494820.2014.964263
Henry, A., & Thorsen, C. (2021, January 2). Teachers' self-disclosures and influences on students' motivation: A relational perspective. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 24(1), 1-15. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1441261
Johansen, M. O., Eliassen, S., & Jeno, L. M. (2023). "Why is this relevant for me?": increasing content relevance enhances student motivation and vitality. Frontiers in Psychology, 14(1184804). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184804
Kaiser, L.-M., Großmann, N., & Wilde, M. (2020, November 21). The relationship between students’ motivation and their perceived amount of basic psychological need satisfaction – a differentiated investigation of students’ quality of motivation regarding biology. International Journal of Science Education, 42(17), 2801-2818. doi:10.1080/09500693.2020.1836690
Kong, Y. (2021, October 22). The Role of Experiential Learning on Students’ Motivation and Classroom Engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 771272. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771272
Kosovich, J. J., Hulleman, C. S., Barron, K. E., & Getty, S. (2015). A Practical Measure of Student Motivation: Establishing Validity Evidence for the Expectancy-Value-Cost Scale in Middle School. Journal of Early Adolescence, 35(5-6), 790-816. doi:10.1177/0272431614556890
Leenknecht, M., Wijnia, L., Köhlen, M., Fryer, L., Rikers, R., & Loyens, S. (2021, February 17). Formative assessment as practice: the role of students’ motivation. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(2), 236-255. doi:10.1080/02602938.2020.1765228
Lin-Siegler, X., Ahn, J. N., Chen, J., Fang, F.-F. A., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2016, April). Even Einstein struggled: Effects of learning about great scientists’ struggles on high school students’ motivation to learn science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 314-328. doi:10.1037/edu0000092
Patall, E. A., Steingut, R. R., Vasquez, A. C., Trimble, S. S., Pituch, K. A., & Freeman, J. L. (2018, February). Daily autonomy supporting or thwarting and students’ motivation and engagement in the high school science classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(2), 269-288. doi:10.1037/edu0000214
Steinmayr, R., Weidinger, A. F., Schwinger, M., & Spinath, B. (2019, July 31). The Importance of Students' Motivation for Their Academic Achievement – Replicating and Extending Previous Findings. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(1730). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01730
Xie, K., Vongkulluksn, V. W., Cheng, S.-L., & Jiang, Z. (2022). Examining High-School Students’ Motivation Change Through a Person-Centered Approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(1), 89-107. doi:10.1037/edu0000507
Zou, H., Yao, J., Zhang, Y., & Huang, X. (2023, July 28). The influence of teachers' intrinsic motivation on students' intrinsic motivation: The mediating role of teachers' motivating style and teacher-student relationships. Psychology in the Schools, 61(1), 272-286. doi:10.1002/pits.23050
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