Motivation and Student Value

I have been meaning to write an amazing commentary about these quotes, but realized I just kept putting it off. So, here are the excerpts from a chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences that taps into some themes I am really excited about. 

"There are several ways in which students can value subject matter. Intrinsic value is influenced by interest for the topic and enjoyment experienced when performing the task. Instrumental value refers to students' perceptions of how tasks are related to their future goals and everyday life. Attainment value refers to the personal importance that students place on accomplishing the task."

"Drawing connections to student's personal lives, embedding the introduction of new concepts and skills within meaningful tasks, and emphasizing the instrumental value of mastering a skill or doing well in a subject matter enhances value . . . A second way to enhance value is by incorporating topics that students find interesting."

"Teachers can support autonomy by allowing students to make decisions about topics, selection and planning of activities, and artifact development. When teacher practices are autonomy-supportive, students respond with increased interest and willingly approach challenges."

"One instructional challenge is to determine what students find meaningful."

"Descriptions of how students engage in initial experiences with inquiry suggest that another motivational challenge is that students are often interested in surface features of the investigation, not in the underlying content. Students often get excited about what they are seeing and doing during inquiry. However, students who lack the skills cited above can appear interested an excited about what they are doing, even though this does not necessarily translate into cognitive engagement with the content."

"Beyond the classroom, collaboration with other students, experts, and neighborhood members enhances student motivation. Students are excited when they have the chance to communicate with other students outside of the classroom via the World Wide Web. Opportunities for sharing work with their peers and community members beyond the classroom enhance feelings of ownership and value."

"To meet the instructional challenges of motivating students and promoting cognitive engagement  teachers must be motivated and invested in improving their own knowledge and enactment skills."

"We argue that the field (of Learning Sciences) would profit from making motivation an explicit concern."


Kempler, Toni M., and Joseph S. Krajcik. "Motivation and Cognitive Engagement in Learning Environments." The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. By Phyllis C. Blumenfeld. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 475-86. Print.

ADDIE, Deep Learning, and Badges

As of a few days ago I became a part of a small group working with an 7th/8th grade English teacher here in Utah Valley to develop a series of informal badges for her students. I am very excited for this opportunity, though the other members of my group may quickly ratify my opinion that we are sort of flying by the seat of our pants. Here is our recent video pitch we created as a early sketch/prototype of what we are aiming to do. I will be mainly focused on the second part of the proposal. 

This evening my classmate Katie and I met with the teacher we will be working with, and it was very exciting to discuss the possibilities and experiences that lay ahead. As we tried to think about the best roles for badges to play we tossed around different ideas including, "what needs are in the classroom?" "what concepts are challenging for students to grasp". From that point we started pinning down the fact that we want to focus on helping the teacher invite the students to have deeper experiences and meaningful interaction with the lesson material. Now we are planning on taking some specific topics she has given us to develop and design some material that will culminate in earning a badge. Our idea at the moment is that to evaluate our success in this experience we will need to find some way of measuring whether we were able to satisfy our purpose of helping students engage with the content in a deeper way. However, if they just do the steps required for the badge we hope that the mere experience of doing these things will influence them in a meaningful way. 

As we discussed I realized we were actually following an old and established model of instruction - ADDIE! It feels good to try to apply something, even if it wasn't our intention from the outset. 

At my current job I have had the opportunity to do a little research, have access to knowledgeable people and resources, and time to write learning and teaching tips. One such tip is about Deep Learning, which I think applies to what we are trying to encourage in the 7th and 8th graders in this English Class. 

Sometimes it can be tempting to see the college experience as a series of hoops to jump through or one big game. Interestingly enough, researchers and scholars have studied the impact of this perspective on students and have found that it can lead to superficial retention of material and really doesn’t bring about long-term understanding or retention (Warren,2004). So what if this is the way you generally approach all of your classes? If this is the case, it is essential for you to learn about a term called Deep Learning.

Over the years, the terms “Deep Learning” and “Surface Learning” have arisen as scholars and academics have studied student and teacher attitudes in education. According to experts at the University of Oxford, the general characteristics of Deep learning include:

• An intention to understand material for oneself
• Rigorous and critical interaction with knowledge content
• Relating ideas to one’s previous knowledge and experience
• Discovering and using organizing principles to integrate ideas
• Relating evidence to conclusions
• Examining the logic of arguments

In many ways Deep Learning is related to developing a “Growth Mentality” and “Learning for the Right Reasons”, and has important and lasting influence on other aspects of your life. Opposed to Deep Learning is Surface learning. Lublin (2003) explained that students who take a surface approach tend to:

• Try to learn in order to repeat what they have learned
• Memorize information needed for assessments
• Make use of rote learning
• Take a narrow view and concentrate on detail
• Fail to distinguish principles from examples
• Tend to stick closely to the course requirements
• Are motivated by fear of failure  

Hopefully the badges we create, and the small bits of instruction that we design will not only be motivating, but promote deep learning.

Mindset and "non-cognitive skills" - some roots of good education

Education has been full of many different kinds of debates, one being the basic and broad question: what is the purpose of our education system? The problem with this question is that not only does our answers influence the way we approach instruction, but this perspective greatly hampers (or strengthens) the learner themselves.

It is clear that there are some significant problems with education in America. So, who should we blame? The teachers who "just don't care"? What about those bad parents that don't push their kids to excel? Maybe it is the new generation of learners, the digital natives who are watching thousands of hours of TV or other media?

Asking who is at blame is a waste of time. Rather, we should be asking what can we do about it? Fortunately, many professionals are asking this question. Surprisingly experts are finding that students excel not necessarily by longer class hours or better media tools, but by developing what Carol Dweck calls a "growth mindset". Below is a short video of some of the views and findings she wrote about in her influential book.

 Dweck is not discussing effective ways to use Twitter in teaching, or really anything new when it comes to good teaching. What she is doing, is focusing us on the fact that children - and students in general - must come to understand that they can do better and continue to improve themselves. Failure is not the end.

Beyond these discussions of how to give feedback, and the influence of constructive feedback and learning by failing, is the subject of the most recent This American Life broadcast. I quote below from the program's website which gives a short summary of some of the content on the 1 hour show (I recommend listening to the whole thing of course!).

"Ira talks with Paul Tough, author of the new book How Children Succeed, about the traditional ways we measure ability and intelligence in American schools. They talk about the focus on cognitive abilities, conventional "book smarts." They discuss the current emphasis on these kinds of skills in American education, and the emphasis standardized testing, and then turn our attention to a growing body of research that suggests we may be on the verge of a new approach to some of the biggest challenges facing American schools today. Paul Tough discusses how “non-cognitive skills” — qualities like tenacity, resilience, impulse control — are being viewed as increasingly vital in education, and Ira speaks with economist James Heckman, who’s been at the center of this research and this shift."

I think by using the media that students are consuming, we can help "coach" them in a way they can identify with and gain motivation by. Obviously just exposing them to the content won't do, but sincere and meaningful discussion about things they care about is what will make a difference. Is it possible that by giving students such attention and leveling with their understanding we might help give them the sort of non-cognitive skills needed? Maybe not, but I think there is an argument here that is worth voicing.