Motivating Students
Author
education Date
2021-09-27 17:25
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226
Introduction
Fostering student motivation is a difficult but necessary aspect of teaching that instructors must consider. Many may have led classes where students are engaged, motivated, and excited to learn, but have also led classes where students are distracted, disinterested, and reluctant to engage—and, probably, have led classes that are a mix. What factors influence students’ motivation? How can instructors promote students’ engagement and motivation to learn? While there are nuances that change from student to student, there are also models of motivation that serve as tools for thinking through and enhancing motivation in our classrooms. This guide will look at the framework: the ARCS model of instructional design. This model highlights four factors that influence student motivation. The aim of this guide is to explore some of the literature on motivation and offer practical solutions for understanding and enhancing student motivation.
ARCS Model of Instructional Design
The ARCS model of instructional design was created to improve the motivational appeal of instructional materials. The ARCS model is grounded in an expectancy-value framework, which assumes that people are motivated to engage in an activity if it’s perceived to be linked to the satisfaction of personal needs and if there is a positive expectancy for success.
The purpose of this model was to fill a gap in the motivation literature by providing a model that could more clearly allow instructors to identify strategies to help improve motivation levels within their students.
ARCS is an acronym that stands for four factors, according to the model, that influence student motivation: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction.
- Attention refers to getting and sustaining student attention and directing attention to the appropriate stimuli.
- Relevance involves making instruction applicable to present and future career opportunities, showing that learning in it of itself is enjoyable, and/or focusing on process over product by satisfying students’ psychological needs (e.g., need for achievement, need for affiliation).
- Confidence includes helping students believe that some level of success is possible if effort is exerted.
- Satisfaction is attained by helping students feel good about their accomplishments and allowing them to exert some degree of control over the learning experience.
To use the ARCS instructional design model, these steps can be followed:
1. Define
- Classify the problem
- Analyze audience motivation
- Prepare motivational objectives (i.e., identify which factor in the ARCS model to target based on the defined problem and audience analysis).
2. Design
- Generate potential motivational strategies for each objective
- Select strategies that a) don’t take up too much instructional time; b) don’t detract from instructional objectives; c) fall within time and money constraints; d) are acceptable to the audience; and e) are compatible with the instructor’s personal style, preferences, and mode of instruction.
3. Develop
- Prepare motivational elements
- Integrate materials with instruction
4. Evaluate
- Conduct a developmental try-out
- Assess motivational outcomes
Strategies to Enhance Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction
Keller (1987) provides several suggestions for how instructors can positively impact students’ attention, perceived relevance, confidence, and satisfaction.
1) ATTENTION STRATEGIES
Incongruity, Conflict
- Introduce a fact that seems to contradict the learner’s past experience.
- Present an example that does not seem to exemplify a given concept.
- Introduce two equally plausible facts or principles, only one of which can be true.
- Play devil’s advocate.
Concreteness
- Show visual representations of any important object or set of ideas or relationships.
- Give examples of every instructionally important concept or principle.
- Use content-related anecdotes, case studies, biographies, etc.
Variability
- In stand up delivery, vary the tone of your voice, and use body movement, pauses, and props.
- Vary the format of instruction (information presentation, practice, testing, etc.) according to the attention span of the audience.
- Vary the medium of instruction (platform delivery, film, video, print, etc.).
- Break up print materials by use of white space, visuals, tables, different typefaces, etc.
- Change the style of presentation (humorous-serious, fast-slow, loud-soft, active-passive, etc.).
- Shift between student-instructor interaction and student-student interaction.
Humor
- Where appropriate, use plays on words during redundant information presentation.
- Use humorous introductions.
- Use humorous analogies to explain and summarize.
Inquiry
- Use creativity techniques to have learners create unusual analogies and associations to the content.
- Build in problem solving activities at regular interval.
- Give learners the opportunity to select topics, projects and assignments that appeal to their curiosity and need to explore.
Participation
- Use games, role plays, or simulations that require learner participation.
2) RELEVANCE STRATEGIES
Experience
- State explicitly how the instruction builds on the learner’s existing skills.
- Use analogies familiar to the learner from past experience.
- Find out what the learners’ interests are and relate them to the instruction.
Present Worth
- State explicitly the present intrinsic value of learning the content, as distinct from its value as a link to future goals.
Future Usefulness
- State explicitly how the instruction relates to future activities of the learner.
- Ask learners to relate the instruction to their own future goals (future wheel).
Need Matching
- To enhance achievement striving behavior, provide opportunities to achieve standards of excellence under conditions of moderate risk.
- To make instruction responsive to the power motive, provide opportunities for responsibility, authority, and interpersonal influence.
- To satisfy the need for affiliation, establish trust and provide opportunities for no-risk, cooperative interaction.
Modeling
- Bring in alumni of the course as enthusiastic guest lecturers.
- In a self-paced course, use those who finish first as deputy tutors.
- Model enthusiasm for the subject taught.
Choice
- Provide meaningful alternative methods for accomplishing a goal.
- Provide personal choices for organizing one’s work.
3) CONFIDENCE STRATEGIES
Learning Requirements
- Incorporate clearly stated, appealing learning goals into instructional materials.
- Provide self-evaluation tools which are based on clearly stated goals.
- Explain the criteria for evaluation of performance.
Difficulty
- Organize materials on an increasing level of difficulty; that is, structure the learning material to provide a “conquerable” challenge.
Expectations
- Include statements about the likelihood of success with given amounts of effort and ability.
- Teach students how to develop a plan of work that will result in goal accomplishment.
- Help students set realistic goals.
Attributions
- Attribute student success to effort rather than luck or ease of task when appropriate (i.e., when you know it’s true!).
- Encourage student efforts to verbalize appropriate attributions for both successes and failures.
Self-Confidence
- Allow students opportunity to become increasingly independent in learning and practicing a skill.
- Have students learn new skills under low risk conditions, but practice performance of well-learned tasks under realistic conditions.
- Help students understand that the pursuit of excellence does not mean that anything short of perfection is failure; learn to feel good about genuine accomplishment.
4) SATISFACTION STRATEGIES
Natural Consequences
- Allow a student to use a newly acquired skill in a realistic setting as soon as possible.
- Verbally reinforce a student’s intrinsic pride in accomplishing a difficult task.
- Allow a student who masters a task to help others who have not yet done so.
Unexpected Rewards
- Reward intrinsically interesting task performance with unexpected, non-contingent rewards.
- Reward boring tasks with extrinsic, anticipated rewards.
Positive Outcomes
- Give verbal praise for successful progress or accomplishment.
- Give personal attention to students.
- Provide informative, helpful feedback when it is immediately useful.
- Provide motivating feedback (praise) immediately following task performance.
Negative Influences
- Avoid the use of threats as a means of obtaining task performance.
- Avoid surveillance (as opposed to positive attention).
- Avoid external performance evaluations whenever it is possible to help the student evaluate his or her own work.
Scheduling
- Provide frequent reinforcements when a student is learning a new task.
- Provide intermittent reinforcement as a student becomes more competent at a task.
- Vary the schedule of reinforcements in terms of both interval and quantity.
Additional Strategies for Motivating Students
- Become a role model for student interest. Deliver your presentations with energy and enthusiasm. As a display of your motivation, your passion motivates your students. Make the course personal, showing why you are interested in the material.
- Get to know your students. You will be able to better tailor your instruction to the students’ concerns and backgrounds, and your personal interest in them will inspire their personal loyalty to you. Display a strong interest in students’ learning and a faith in their abilities.
- Use examples freely. Many students want to be shown why a concept or technique is useful before they want to study it further. Inform students about how your course prepares students for future opportunities.
- Use a variety of student-active teaching activities. These activities directly engage students in the material and give them opportunities to achieve a level of mastery.
- Teach by discovery. Students find it satisfying to reason through a problem and discover the underlying principle on their own.
- Cooperative learning activities are particularly effective as they also provide positive social pressure.
- Set realistic performance goals and help students achieve them by encouraging them to set their own reasonable goals. Design assignments that are appropriately challenging in view of the experience and aptitude of the class.
- Place appropriate emphasis on testing and grading. Tests should be a means of showing what students have mastered, not what they have not. Avoid grading on the curve and give everyone the opportunity to achieve the highest standard and grades.
- Be free with praise and constructive in criticism. Negative comments should pertain to particular performances, not the performer. Offer nonjudgmental feedback on students’ work, stress opportunities to improve, look for ways to stimulate advancement, and avoid dividing students into sheep and goats.
- Give students as much control over their own education as possible. Let students choose paper and project topics that interest them. Assess them in a variety of ways (tests, papers, projects, presentations, etc.) to give students more control over how they show their understanding to you. Give students options for how these assignments are weighted.