How to motivate students? Easy.
Make sure they have a sense autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
March 2022 Monthly Ed Tip: How to motivate students!
All educators strive to motivate students to be focused, engaged and blissful learners who demonstrate motivation, productivity, creativity, and a true joy of learning.
A proven method to achieve these goals is to ensure that one’s three basic basis needs are fulfilled: autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose. When these needs are satisfied, we are motivated, productive, and happy. When they are thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet. These needs are the foundation of intrinsic motivation and are the core of Edward Deci’s and Richard Ryan’s groundbreaking and time-tested Theory of Self-Determination.
Use your Crystal Ball
It is 1996 and use your crystal ball to predict 15 years into the future which encyclopedia will be more successful in 2011. Microsoft, already a hugely successful company, is funding the first one. It will pay professional writers and editors to craft articles on thousands of topics, and then sell the encyclopedia on CD-ROMs and later online.
The second one was not from a company, no one will get paid, and the information will be free to all to view and use. It is created by tens of thousands of people who write articles and edit the articles for fun. Participants will contribute their labor for free.
Today one is hugely successful and the other is defunct.
To understand what happened, one must explore the work of Harry F. Harlow, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who in the 1940s established one of the world’s first laboratories for studying primate behavior.
In 1949, Harlow put eight Rhesus monkeys into cages with a simple mechanical puzzle for a two-week experiment. Solving it required three steps: pull out the vertical pin, undo the hook, and lift the hinged cover as shown below.
Almost immediately, something happened. Unbidden by any outside urging and unprompted by the experimenters, the monkeys began playing with the puzzles with focus, determination, and what looked like enjoyment. And in short order, they solved the puzzles frequently and quickly, and two-thirds of the time in less than 60 seconds.
This behavior ran counter to the accepted notion of the time of how primates behaved, including humans. Scientists at the time believed two main drives powered behavior: biological drive and extrinsic motivation.
Examples of biological drive are behaviors that ensure the survival of the species such ashunger, drinking, and sex. But that wasn’t happening in the experiment. “Solution did not lead to food, water, or sex gratification,” Harlow reported. This drive came from within.
Extrinsic Motivation is defined as reward and punishment from the environment for behaving in certain ways: Studying longer to get an A on a test, working harder to get a raise, or docking one’s pay for showing up late to work are examples of extrinsic motivation. In the experiment no reward was received or punishment given to the monkeys.
“The behavior obtained in this investigation poses some interesting questions for motivation theory, since significant learning was attained and efficient performance maintained without resort to special or extrinsic motivation,” Harlow wrote.
Harlow proposed a novel solution, a third drive, to explain Rhesus monkeys’ behavior. “The performance of the task provided intrinsic reward,” he rationalized. The monkeys solved the puzzles simply because they found it gratifying, they enjoyed it, and the joy of the task was its own reward. Harlow eventual termed this “intrinsic motivation.”
Harlow sounded the alarm. He urged scientists to “close down large sections of our theoretical junkyard,” and offer fresher, more accurate accounts of human behavior and warning that explanations of why we did what we did was incomplete. Harlow said that to truly understand the human condition, we had to take account of this third drive.
But at the time the prevailing two drives held a tight grip on scientific thinking, so he dropped the whole idea. He abandoned this contentious line of research and later became famous for studies on the science of affection.
His notion of this third drive bounced around the physiological literature, but it remained on the periphery of behavioral science and of our understanding of ourselves.
Two decades later, it was picked up by a psychology graduate student at Carnegie Mellon in search of a dissertation topic.
In the summer of 1969, Edward Deci was intrigued by motivation and suspected scholars and businesspeople misunderstood it. Deci discovered Harlow’s work and went on to study it with the help of the Soma puzzle.
The Soma puzzle at the time was a popular Parker Brothers game that consist of 7 pieces-6 comprising 4 one-inch cubes and one comprising 3 one-inch cubes. Players can assemble the 7 pieces into a few million possible combinations – from abstract shapes to recognizable objects.
In his study published in 1971, Deci echoed what Harlow discovered two decades earlier. Deci’s work revealed that human motivation seemed to operate by laws that ran counter to what most scientists and citizens believed.
Deci wrote that human beings have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn.”
In his seminal book, Intrinsic Motivation (1975), Deci examined the existing research and theory on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and offered the definition and explanation of intrinsic motivation that is still widely cited today.
Deci believes children are born with “undifferentiated intrinsic motivation” and then, due to “a need for competence and self-determination” develop differentiated (specific) intrinsic motives such as achievement and self-actualization (Deci, 1975, p. 77, 92).
Throughout the book, Deci uses experimental studies to illustrate and explain his concepts, providing the reader with concrete examples of his points. This book was not the first piece to look at the concept of intrinsic motivation, in fact, Deci’s work was based on the contributions of many other researchers and theorists. However, it was probably the most comprehensive and influential publication on intrinsic motivation at a time when interest in this concept was gaining momentum, and it remains a well-referenced wealth of information on this topic.
Deci teamed up with Richard Ryan in 1977 and they became among the most influential behavioral scientists of their generation.
Together they developed the Self-Determination theory (SDT) that begins with a notion of universal human needs. SDT centers on the belief that all humans have three innate psychological needs: autonomy, competency, and relatedness.
When these needs are satisfied, we are motivated, productive, and happy. When they are thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.
Ryan writes that “If there’s anything {fundamental} about our nature, it is the capacity for interest. Some things facilitate it. Some things undermine it. It is part of what it means to be human. But whether that aspect of our humanity emerges in our lives depends on whether the conditions around us support it.”
Deci and Ryan have produced over a hundred research papers, most of which point to the same conclusion. Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”
In his book Drive, Daniel Pink writes that autonomy is the most important of the three basic human needs, the sun in which the SDT’s planets orbit. “Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice,” states Deci.
Consider Richard Ryan comments on autonomy: “The course of human history has always moved in the direction of greater freedom. And there’s a reason for that, because it is our nature to push for it. If we were just plastic like some people think, this wouldn’t be happening. But someone stands in front of a tank in China. Women, who’ve been denied autonomy, keep advocating for rights. This is the course of history. This is why ultimate human nature, if it realizes itself, will do so by becoming more autonomous.”
Two points bear pointing out when discussing autonomy.
First, autonomy is different than independence. It means acting with choice, which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.
Second, the opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us towards different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.
Research has shown that a sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude, promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhances persistence at school, higher productivity, less burnout, and a greater level of psychological well-being.
Examples from the business world illustrate this effect.
Call centers have turnover rates about 35%, double the rate of other jobs and some exceed 100%. To help alleviate this problem, some companies are reversing the trend of offshoring to homeshoring. Service and customers calls are routed to company’s reps’ homes instead of a large, single building at a site in another country. This change provides far greater autonomy over how employees do their jobs, cuts commuting time for staff, and removes them from physical monitoring.
Jet Blue was one of the first to try it in 2000. As a result of the change it has high customer service ratings, productivity and job satisfaction are elevated, and because of its autonomy-centered approach, it draws from a deeper pool of talent resulting in 70% to 80% of their employees having college degrees. Other companies have adapted this approach including 1-800-Flowers, J. Crew, Office Depot, and even the IRS.
The work of Teresa Amabile, who studies the day-to-day motivation levels of people on the job, writes in her book The Progress Principle about the positive effect of autonomy, competency and relatedness in the workforce.
Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and Director of Research at Harvard Business School, believes that the single greatest motivator is “making progress in one’s work. The days people make progress are the days they felt most motivated and engaged.”
Citing results of a multiyear research project in The Progress Principle, she found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what she calls “inner work life”: the constant flow of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that constitute a person’s reactions to the events of the work day. Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line. People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.
What were your crystal ball predictions?
On October 31, 2009 Microsoft pulled the plug on MSN Encarta.
In 2001, Wikipedia, the second one, erupted. It was said at the time it was the dumbest idea in history-that unknown amateurs anywhere in the world could write a reliable and useful encyclopedia with little supervision, and that only world-class experts overseen by ruthless editors could do that. But Wikipedia swelled in size and depth and quality. Wikipedia has become the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world. After 9 years, it had more than 17 million articles in some 270 languages, including 3.5 million in English alone.
What attributed to the success of Wikipedia?
Specifically, the attributes that comprise the Self-Determination theory: autonomy, competency, and relatedness. Obviously, the contributors to and editors of Wikipedia have complete autonomy, are extremely competent, and the material that they are commenting on has meaning to them.
Why can’t the same three attributes of the SDT that centers on the belief that all humans have three innate psychological needs be applied to the classroom by all teachers every day?
Giving students choices is an easy and proven pedagogy to introduce autonomy into the curriculum, thereby allowing students autonomy to tailor their education to their own preferences and allow more flexibility in how they learn.
According to a study by Hanover Research, “Student choice makes students active participants in their educations, thereby increasing levels of engagement. Notably, researchers highlight the fact that such autonomy is generally associated with greater personal well‐being and satisfaction in educational environments as well as in terms of academic performance.”
Some possible methods are allowing students a choice to write a report or to give an oral presentation or take a test to demonstrate subject matter competency. This allows them the opportunity to take a test at the time of their choosing be it in class or some other time (within limitations).
Another technique that has proven popular is learning menus, or choice boards, which offer students four to six options for producing a final product. Each choice should be challenging and should require approximately the same amount of time to complete. Below are two examples of learning menus.
An enormous amount of research has shown that enabling students’ autonomy, ensuring their mastery of the instructional material, and instilling a sense of purpose will motivate them to become focused, engaged and blissful learners who demonstrate motivation, productivity, creativity, and a true joy of learning.