Top 3 factors that predict academic motivation

Here are the top three ranked, according to this meta-analysis, from l’Université Laval, Monash University and Curtin University.

1 — 🪡 Competence (I can do this!)

Students experiencing competence are confident that their actions are impactful in shaping their academic experience.

2 — 🆎 Autonomy (I get to choose)

Students experiencing autonomy perceive that they are engaging in learning tasks freely and voluntarily, without perceived coercion.

3 — 🏠 Belonging (I am not alone)

Students experiencing relatedness feel connected with important others in their school (e.g., teachers, friends)

As reported here by Jill Barshay,

Bureau [Julien Bureau — the lead author] describes the three needs — competency, belonging and autonomy — as “kindling” for intrinsic or internal motivation. “If you start doing a task,” he said, “and it’s a new task, and you feel competent in it, and you feel connected with others, and you feel autonomous in doing the task, you’ve chosen to do it. You’ll have fun doing it. You’ll want to do it more. And you’ll be interested in learning.”

We love to use the spark and fire metaphor for learning, and here Bureau explores the fuel or ‘kindling’. But I think this is limited.

You will have your preferred metaphor for learning too, but I think of competency, belonging and autonomy as part of the conditions for growth, not destruction.

Along with many other variables and environmental factors, competency, belonging, and autonomy are the nutrients in the soil that trigger growth.

Connection to Place

Reference to belonging and connectedness makes me also think of the physical learning environment. This week I have been immersed in collaborating with primary school teachers about contemporary learning environments.

When children feel ownership of the classroom, it appears the stage is set for cultivating feelings of responsibility (DeVries and Zan 1994). Classrooms that feature the products of students’ intellectual engagements, projects, displays, and construction are also found to promote greater participation and involvement in the learning process (Ulrich 2004).

This is from the Clever Classrooms, a summary report created by the Holistic Evidence and Design Project at Salford University.

They found that the physical characteristics of a learning space related to individualisation: ownership, and flexibility were particularly influential in learning progress for the 3766 primary students in the study.

Clever Classrooms is an accessible report I highly recommend. Here are some of the checkpoints for teachers about ownership (p32).

• A classroom that includes pupil-created work in displays is more likely to provide a sense of ownership.
• The classroom can be made readily recognisable from others by distinctive class-made displays/artwork of, for example, people, houses, animals, trees.
• Opportunities should be grasped to allow pupils to personalise aspects of the classroom, e.g. named lockers or drawers.
• Good quality, child-centric, furniture, fixture and equipment can be used to strongly support learning and indicate that pupils are valued.

Combine these findings and ideas with the original paper we are focusing on this week, and you have some valuable provocations.

Emotions are the Rudder

A notable missing piece of the student motivation paper is the role of emotion in learning. When I search the document for reference to ‘emotion’, the only returns I get are from citations and other works.

The role of emotion is a silent backdrop to some of these findings. Despite not being overtly stated in the paper in focus, emotion is inextricably connected to each element of competence, autonomy and belonging.

As neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio explain:

Cognition happens because of emotion. There’s really no such thing as a thought that doesn’t have an emotion attached to it or that doesn’t have an emotion that follows it. When we take in the world around us, we have an emotional reaction to that appraisal. That emotional reaction changes the way we think in the next moment and cumulatively, over time.

And this following extract, Immordino-Yang illustrates the connection between emotion and competence.

if you’re solving a math problem and you think, Oh yeah, I recognize this; that’s a quadratic equation. That little moment of, I know this! (or alternately I don’t; am I on the right track?), that’s emotion steering the way you access your memory. Recognizing that a skill (like solving a math problem) is relevant in a particular context is an emotional recognition. We need these subtle emotional intuitions for minute-by-minute problem solving, and therefore, they become a dimension of the skill itself. As teachers, we can help students become aware of how emotions steer thinking, and help them develop well-tuned academic intuitions.

The comment that a student’s emotional intuitions become a dimension of the skill itself is fascinating to consider. A further illustration of how complex these experiences are and how emotion is independent of competency, autonomy and belonging.

I will leave you with a final provocation from Professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang,

It’s literally neurobiologically impossible to remember or think deeply about anything that you haven’t felt emotion about. It just doesn’t happen because it would be a waste of the brain’s resources to think a lot about stuff that doesn’t matter.

Your Talking Points

Instead of more ideas, I want to close with a reminder of critical questions and provocations to grapple with when exploring evidence and research.

• How do the cultural norms in my school intersect with these findings?
• The Clever Classrooms findings focus on primary or elementary-age students in the UK — what is relevant for my setting?
• Have we systematically identified the right approach to achieve these goals?
• Is there reliable evidence it can have the desired impact if implemented well?
• Are these concepts feasible within our context?