What do we know about motivation and learning? What kind of motivation promotes learning? What kind of motivation promotes creativity? Does motivation affect memory retention? In this post I will try to answer some of these questions and try to understand some of the possible implications of these results for our teaching practices.
Motivation is a complex thing, but for the purposes of our analysis I will try to simplify it a bit. In connection to learning is important to understand the kind of motivation that make us to commit to long learning goals, such as completing a degree or learning a new skill. But also the kind of motivation that make us to really pay attention in a lecture, and that help us to persevere when things get difficult.
Long commitment to a learning goal is commonly driven by two main types of motivation, motivation by performance goals, i.e performing well in comparison to others, as for example by obtaining good grades, or getting into a high paid job. And motivation by mastery goals, such as the intrinsic rewards of learning to play an instrument or understanding the theory of general relativity (Murayama, K.,2018). When learning something most of us are motivated by a combination of these two different types of motivation, and what type the motivation is dominant could variate from subject to subject. For instance my motivation to learn to play an instrument could be mainly guided by mastery goals, but my motivation to learn about fire safety could be more related to a performance goal of my job. The interesting thing is that depending on which type of motivation is dominant, the quality of learning can be affected. Some research has shown that when students are mainly motivated by performance goals they outperform students who are mainly motivated by mastery goals in short memory retention, but in terms of long term memory retention (i.e. real learning) students motivated by mastery goals perform better than those motivated by performance goals (Murayama, 2018). Therefore, for our learning journeys designs, whether is the delivery of a unit or course, it is important to design a structure that helps students to develop a strong mastery goal motivation that supersedes the structure of performance goal motivators such as grades.
Does this mean that performance goals are bad? Performance goals are closely related to rewards (social or material) so what is the relation between rewards and learning? Do the motivation derived from rewards promotes learning? Research from educational neuroscience shows that there is a connection between the anticipation of rewards and activation of areas of the brain required for learning, and rewards can improve short memory retention as we mentioned above (STEM Learning, 2021). But there is also research that shows that when extrinsic rewards become dominant in the learning activity, they can decrease engagement and hinder creativity when the learning activity has a high intrinsic value (i.e when the task is very interesting) (Schwartz D., Tsang J., Blair K. 2016). From here we can see that the anticipation of rewards can be beneficial to prepare your brain to get involved in a learning activity, but to make the most of the learning it is important that the reward system is not dominant over the intrinsic value of the learning activity. Grades are a good example of how when a reward systems becomes dominant it can have a negative impact on engagement with learning. A high focus on grades (like in all our educational systems) can result in a decreased interest in taking creative risks as the price of failure can be very high, and it can also result in disengagement with content, causing studying for the grades instead of studying to learn (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). Summarising, rewards can be very helpful to get students in the learning mode, for instance by promoting active learning via scored interactive quizzes, but getting the rewards should not be the goal of the learning activity, but instead the goal should always be the intrinsic value of the learning involved in the activity. As corollary, if you have kids never give them material rewards for completing the already interesting math homework.
From this analysis we can conclude that motivation by mastery goals and intrinsic value are essential to develop good quality learning and that rewards can help us to engage in the processes of learning. However deep learning is difficult, challenging and requires an intensive sustained effort, and many times the intrinsic value of the goals is not enough to keep us motivated. Think for example of new year resolutions, or that paper you want to write that will revolutionise your field. Despite the intrinsic value of these goals, many times it is hard to commit to the difficult journey involved in achieving those goals. And in many cases, even when the rewards associated with these goals are big, the anticipation of the reward don’t help us either to commit to achieve these goals. The remaining question is what keep us motivated when confronting difficult and challenging learning.
References:
- Gibbs, G.and Simpson, C. (2005), Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (1). pp. 331. ISSN 1742240X
- Murayama, K. (2018). The science of motivation, Multidisciplinary approaches advance research on the nature and effects of motivation. Psychological Science Agenda, Vol 32, No 6.
- STEM Learning. The Science of Learning. Future Learn. Available at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/science-of-learning. (Acessed: 11/11/2021).
- Schunk, D. H. (1995). Self-efficacy, motivation, and performance. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 7(2), 112-137.
- Schwartz D., Tsang J., Blair K. (2016). The ABC’s of How We Learn 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How they work and When to Use Them. W.W Norton & Company, New York, London.
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