Hello – I hope things are going well this term/semester so far!
Recently I promised to delve into the motivation of studying, and that is our focus this week.
You can also find my previous posts on study skills here:
But as mentioned, it’s not enough just to know how to study—you also need to want to. Some psychologists have dubbed this having the ‘skill and the will’ to study. The will side of this is where motivation comes in.
What is Motivation
At first it may seem obvious what motivation is, but it’s surprisingly hard to define.
Sometimes I ask my education students to start by considering what an unmotivated learner would look like. Many of the things we associate with a lack of motivation are behavioural – procrastination, being easily distracted, not completing work carefully, etc.
Psychologists sum these up as a learner’s activation, intensity and persistence with a task. That is to say, how fast do they start, how intensely do they work, and how long do they persist?
However, these aspects could all be hard to interpret without considering what’s going on inside a learner’s head. Motivation also has a psychological element, and this is what modern theories tend to focus on.
Self-Determination
A current psychological theory of motivation is self-determination theory, devised by Ryan and Deci (e.g. Ryan & Deci, 2000; 2017). This theory draws on several areas of psychology, including social psychology, evolutionary influences, and the idea of basic needs.
A key aspect involves three main factors seen as increasing (or reducing) motivation in learning and other contexts:
Autonomy: how much choice and control does the person have?
Relatedness: does a task involve meaningful social connections?
Competence: how good is the person at the task?
I find these ideas quite practical as a framework for thinking about how we can motivate learners.
In an independent study context, we can seek to provide some choices. We don’t want learners to choose flawed techniques, but we could, for example, offer a choice between two ways to do retrieval practice. We can also ensure mastery of foundations in class, so that the student feels competent to tackle difficult work independently.
Another useful idea from Ryan and Deci’s research is that while students are intrinsically motivated by some things and extrinsically motivated by others, these are not fixed. An extrinsic motivation can become intrinsic over time.
This makes sense. After the initial (rewarded) practice, competence improves. So, probably, does autonomy (a more skilled learner has more options), as well as relatedness (usually they have been learning with peers).
This all fits well with the study below, which concluded that rather than students seeking to find their passion (as is sometimes recommended), curiosity about subjects is developed through a process of learning more:
O’Keefe, P. A., Dweck, C. S., & Walton, G. M. (2018). Implicit theories of interest: Finding your passion or developing it? Psychological Science, 29(10),1653–1664.
O’Keefe and colleagues found that when people viewed interests as fixed, they saw difficulties as a bad things. As an educator, this means learners may be excited when things are easy, but easily discouraged by harder work.
Rather than assuming that motivation is already fully formed within the learner, we should try to see (and present) interest and curiosity as something that develops through engaging fully and deeply with material.
Perhaps the simplest application is to be wary of asking students what they are interested in. That implies that motivation comes before learning! Instead, we can place more emphasis on the satisfaction of completing difficult tasks, and of joining a community of scholars in a given subject.
All in all, this metacognition of motivation is quite consistent with ideas I’ve discussed before, for example teaching students how to learn, and to embrace desirable difficulties.
For more about motivation, check out Marc Smith’s great chapter in our book Psychology in the Classroom.
Hope you have a great week!
Jonathan
Last week: A Dozen Simple Metacognition Strategies, Part 2.
In case you missed my announcement last week, I have a book Metacognition and Study Skills coming out later this year! I’ve been told that it will publish in early July 2024. More details in a future update.
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.