ELearning/Course design/Motivational support
Motivation is a complicated human phenomenon, and is difficult to encapsulate into a coherent whole. It can be wrapped in issues ranging from lack of confidence, lack of perceived relevance, mismatched skillsets, boredom, to an "entertain me" attitude. For now, we look at two points of intervention - the beginning of instruction and the construction of course activities.
Mindset interventions
Mindset interventions address the doubts and misconceptions of incoming students, helping to overcome fear and instilling confidence. We have seen two types of interventions, often interwoven: addressing fears head-on and instill a growth mindset. Both approaches have proven to have a positive impact on student achievement.
- Addressing fears has taken the form of letters from upperclassmen, changing the meaning of experiences, and reframing anxiety symptoms:
- Conquering the Freshman Fear of Failure Incoming freshmen read upperclassmen's accounts of how they navigated the shoals of university life. (NYT)
- Who Gets to Graduate? "We don’t prevent you from experiencing those bad things. Instead, we try to change the meaning of them, so that they don’t mean to you that things are never going to get better." (NYT Magazine)
- Techniques emphasizing self-regulation, emotional control, and reappraisal of physiological threat responses (physical symptoms such as heart rate, sweating). For example, among participants who were planning to take the GRE, those who were told that physiological arousal improves performance showed significantly better performance on the math section of the GRE than control participants who were not told of the benefits of anxiety. Additionally, interventions can aim to temporarily reduce students’ math anxiety at times when it poses the greatest threat to performance, such as immediately before an exam. Asking students to write about their thoughts and feelings prior to taking a math test lessened the performance gap between high- and low-math-anxiety individuals. Rather than eliminating the strong physiological reaction many students have to math, it may be just as useful to engage in the expression or reappraisal of these emotional responses or, perhaps, simply to reframe the physiological reaction (Foley et al., 2017).
- Instilling a growth mindset has taken the form of short online interventions and changing the type of encouragement students receive:
- Online 'mindset' interventions help students do better in school, Stanford research shows Stanford researchers found that brief Internet-based interventions that instill a "growth mindset" and a sense of purpose can improve learning, especially for struggling students. (Stanford News)
- Fixed Versus Growth Mindsets Growth mindset and fixed mindset aren’t just different beliefs. They have profound effects on how we experience learning situations and setbacks. (Stanford Teaching Commons)
- Mind-Set Interventions Are a Scalable Treatment for Academic Underachievement Research Abstract (Psychological Science)
ARCS instructional checklist
Keller (2010) created a four-part model to deal with the problem of student motivation, called the ARCS model: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. To be used to its fullest potential, each attribute must be considered throughout the course design.
After we have created our initial instructional strategy, using the ARCS model as a motivational checklist can inspire adjustments that add interest and energy to our design.
Gain attention
Capturing student interest. Think arousal, curiosity, focus, and sensation seeking on one end of a continuum and boredom, distraction, and negativity on the other and we begin to grasp the essence of attention. How do we achieve one set of sensations while avoiding the other? Keller provides us with three useful tools:
A1: Perceptual Arousal - reflexive reactions to stimuli: almost any sudden or unexpected change in the environment will elicit attention. This is the first, and fleeting, step in the attention process and needs to be followed by the next stage of arousal.
A2: Inquiry Arousal - introducing a problem situation that can be resolved only by knowledge-seeking behavior, asking questions, evoking a sense of mystery and awe, progressive disclosure, all in the service of arousing curiosity and exploratory behavior.
A3: Variability - without variety, the brain quickly habituates and screens out stimuli. Vary your voice volume and tone when speaking, vary your methods of relaying content, combine camera shots of you and PowerPoint slides during a recorded lecture, and include graphics and animation. Add a game for learning how to apply the content. Mix it up.
Demonstrate relevance
Whether consciously or unconsciously, people presented with information wonder, "How does this relate to my life?" Relevance refers to those things people perceive as instrumental in satisfying personal needs and wants, including accomplishment of career and other goals.
R1: Goal Orientation - setting goals and working to achieve them is a key component of relevance.
- relate course goals to students' personal and professional goals,
- use authentic examples and assignments taken from real life,
- help students make the connection between the content and their lives.
Compare these two sets of learning objectives for a literature course. As a student, which set better connects with your goals?
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R2: Motive matching - especially relevant to the online environment, tuning into student motivations and accommodating them as much as possible increases relevance. Feeling in control, sociability, and a sense of empowerment are powerful motivators for most people. How can your course design accommodate them? Within limits,
- allow students to decide what to do and when,
- include social presence in your design, and
- allow a variety of formats students can use in their assignments. Unless it's a writing course, does everything have to be in writing?
R3: Familiarity - just as people crave novelty, we also take comfort in the familiar. We tend to be most interested in content that has some connections to our experiences and interests.
- use personal pronouns and people's names,
- help students connect with the content on a personal level,
- ask for their stories,
- include and confirm their preexisting knowledge and experience.
Build confidence
The desire to feel competent is a basic motive for humans, and especially adults. Instructors can help their students believe they're in control of their learning and that they will succeed. There is also the problem of overconfidence, leading some to believe they need not pay attention. However, it's more likely that we underestimate student's anxieties about being able to learn - math anxiety seems nearly universal.
C1: Learning requirements - telling students what is expected of them and how they will be evaluated in straightforward language is one of the most fundamental steps instructors can take to clarify expectations and assuage anxiety.
- provide examples,
- discuss important elements,
- describe the use of evidence, and
- demonstrate how to make logical arguments
C2: Success opportunities - experiencing success based on real effort is a big confidence builder! The key is adjusting success requirements to the level of the learner; fairly low levels of challenge with frequent feedback for beginners, moving to more challenging tasks as learning grows. The challenge is to move quickly enough to avoid boredom, but not so quickly that learners become apprehensive.
This is perhaps one of the best arguments for allowing students to pace their own concept learning, allowing for repetition, additional reading or instruction, and additional practice. We remind you also of the "zone of proximal development" where a student may not be able to complete a problem on her own, but with coaching from peers or the instructor, is able to master the task. Multi-stage assignments are more likely to result in success.
C3: Personal control - to enhance motivation, the controlling influence of the instructor should, as much as possible, be focused on leading the experience and ensuring adherence to expected standards, not on the exact route to the standards. This provides a stable environment in which the learner should be allowed as much personal control over the actual learning experience as possible. Experiential learning activities, actionable feedback, and feedback that focuses on effort and tenacity and not talent ("See, you worked it through!") help reinforce personal control. The goal is always moving students from a state of dependence to one of independence and interdependence.
See Study reveals why your brain makes you slip up when anxious for more.
Generate satisfaction
Generate satisfaction so students will continue to be motivated to learn and explore. Consider the things that bring you satisfaction - making discoveries, arriving at answers, gaining mastery, a sense of accomplishment. How can you make these available to students?
S1: Natural consequences - help students experience the pride and sense of accomplishment that comes from completing a challenging task, using newly-learned skills, or gaining new insight. Case studies, simulations, and experiential learning activities can be excellent vehicles for accomplishment.
S2: Extrinsic consequences - regardless of our self-confidence, who doesn't like to hear from a valued mentor that we did well? Reinforcing consequences that stimulate, shape, and maintain behavior have always been a part of human nature. Badges for specific accomplishments are currently popular. Material consequences are not necessary and can dilute the meaning of more natural expressions like appreciation, pride, and confidence.
S3: Equity - the sense that similar outcomes derived from similar effort and skill reinforces positive feelings about oneself and promotes shared pride with others. Perceived differences in effort and reward, on the other hand, quickly deteriorate into disappointment and resentment. By using and demonstrating for students the fair and consistent use of standards, we reinforce high performance goals, shared sense of accomplishment, and our sense of justice. Online, it's not just important to do it, it's also important to say it.
Research capsule
Cultural mismatch. American higher education prioritizes independent models of self as the cultural ideal. This institutional culture produces a mismatch for first-generation students, who are guided by relatively interdependent models of self. During the college transition, cultural mismatch increases first-generation students’ stress and undermines their academic performance, and persists throught their college career. Take this survey to compare your "Five most important skills for students" with college presidents.
Using memories to motivate behavior. Working on the premise that memories of past experiences guide current and future behaviors, researchers asked students to recall past positive or negative exercise episodes, while a control group was not asked to recall. Students who were asked to recall a positive memory about exercise reported significantly higher levels of subsequent exercise activity than students in the control group, even when controlling for other factors. Students who were asked to recall a negative memory also reported an increase in exercise, but to a lesser extent. Though limited in scope, this discovery has great potential, as it underscores the power of memory's directive influence on behavior. The takeaway is to ask learners to recall past situations where they successfully managed a task similar to the present one (Biondolillo & Pillemer, 2014).
Social motivation. Lieberman (2014) cites two studies involving social motivation. The first involved two groups, one instructed to study material for a test (learn for testing) and the other instructed to study with the intention of teaching others (learn for teaching). Although the "learn for teaching" group never actually taught anyone else, they significantly outscored the "learn for testing" group. To investigate possible causes for this difference, he instructed a new set of participants to read a television show description, while in a fMRI scanner, with the intention of summarizing and evaluating the show for their boss. The fMRI revealed strong activity in brain regions involved in social cognition (i.e., amygdala and prefrontal cortex). His conclusion was that "this social view invokes a brain network to support learning when social motivation is present."
Conclusion
We know that learning is not only about knowledge. It's about interest, curiosity, confidence, experimentation, involvement and a myriad of other emotion-laden sensations. We seriously compromise learning when we fail to account for motivation.
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