Motivating Learners and Building Interest

"Without motivation, there is no learning."
- Pauline B. Gough in the esssay "Interest Matters" (Phi Delta Kappan, 83(8), 566)


Dan Pink and Mary Renck Jalongo make compelling cases for our paying careful attention to the roles of motivation and interest in learning, as noted in part one of this entry. Given Pink’s and Jalongo’s insights into the nature of motivation and interest, what is the teacher’s role in motivating learners and building interest?

Jalongo’s analysis lands on five research-based recommendations for “support[ing] children in reaching their full potential.”

[1] Establish a Rationale for Learning
Far too often in teaching and learning, in our zest to teach our children how and what, we sorely neglect why. Jalongo nails the importance of why on three counts:

• “Sansone and Smith (2000) found that when students were provided with reasons for learning, they were more adept at generating strategies for making relatively boring tasks more interesting.”

• “A review of the literature suggests that when children have to deal with dull materials, it places a drain on their ability to focus and slows down their reading and response time.”

• “Conversely, when they work with high interest materials, it ‘frees up’ some of their cognitive resources and makes their processing of information more efficient; this enables them to persist at the task and retain the material better” (Ainley & Hidi 2006).

[2] Set, Monitor and Attain Goals
How do we help, even inspire, students to get from here to there? In part, we articulate our goals in the classroom AND we help students frame their goals as well. We need to name the end game rather than assuming it—or having our students guess at it. And we need to join with our students in mapping out the route our journey will take along with our measures for determining our success. Jalongo focuses on two key points:

• “In order to set learners’ expectations for success, teachers need to share their goals and methods of evaluation with students and establish an emotional climate for success in classrooms.”

• “Evidence suggests that when achievement in a domain is attributed to effort rather than innate ability, students tend to perform better, assuming that value is attached to the goal in their society as well.”
Both Stevenson and Stigler’s work from the early 90’s and Carol Dweck’s more recent work on growth mindset support this argument.

[3] Capture Learners’ Attention
A graduate school professor of mine once shared a syllogism that applies here: “We understand what we remember. We remember what we pay attention to. We pay attention to what we want.” Capturing students’ attention is a sine qua non of enhancing their learning. Quite simply, if students do not pay attention, they do not learn. So how do we achieve that end? Jalongo offers several keen insights:

• “To learn, we first have to understand it: we have to make a connection to prior knowledge; and we have to want to learn it. . .Hook into what is important for your students’ lives, presently and in the future. Connect to what they already know” (Mack-Kirschner, 2005).

• “Tapping into the learners’ experiences and emotions generates interest because ‘personal and meaningful memories can be held in their brilliance while dry facts learned at school may soon fade away’ (Gilbert 2002).”

• “There is ample evidence that human beings are drawn to and remember material in narrative form much better than when the same material is presented as a list of facts.”

In his thought-provoking, often practical and thoroughly researched book Why Students Don't Like School, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham explores the power of story structure in memory and learning. Willingham lands on "four principles" (or the four Cs) of story: causality (events are causally related to one another), conflict (main character is unable to reach a goal), complications (sub-problems that arise from the main goal) and character ("A good story is built around strong, interesting characters, and the key to those qualities is action.")

• “Ask questions that are perplexing, paradoxical or unexpected. . .Good questions. . .help to build a commitment to thoughtful inquiry and reliance on authoritative resources.”

[4] Understand the Role of Choice in Learning
Jalongo brilliantly captures the complexity of the role of choice in learning. Quite rightly, she notes, “Many teachers assume that giving children a wide array of choices will lead to greater engagement and academic achievement; however, both the research and practical experience suggest this is not necessarily the case.”

Indeed, the nature and the context of the choices we give our students have everything to do with the degree to which these choices inspire engagement and motivation, and enhance learning. As Jalongo notes, “Choice involves making a judgment and, in the absence of information on how to render that decision, a huge range of options can backfire, causing students to disengage and rush through the task just to get it over with.”

Jalongo makes a distinction worth careful consideration: “One reason that choice is overrated is that research has tended to confound the variables of choice and interest (Flowerday, Schraw, & Stevens, 2004). In studies of choice, learners usually select something that interests them. Therefore, the positive effects on achievement attributed to choice may actually be attributable to interest.” This takes us back to part 1 of this blog entry and the essential role students’ interest in their motivation and learning.

Finally, on this point, Jalongo specifically addresses the kinds of choices we should consider giving out students: “Contrary to popular opinion, completely individualizing the curriculum is not the only way. It often is preferable to make the course of action—rather than topic—the place where students exercise the most choice.” The Northeast Foundation for Children’s Responsive Classroom’s extensive, well-researched and wonderfully practical recommendations on academic choice support Jalongo’s insights. In Learning Through Academic Choice, author Paula Denton notes that, essentially, teachers have two choices to offer students: [1] What to learn (content) and [2] How to learn it (process). Denton goes on to identify 3 key findings from 32 research studies that examined outcomes of providing choices to students K-12:


I. When students make choices about what and/or how they learn, they become more motivated to learn
· More likely to be on task
· More likely to incorporate use of positive learning behaviors and skills at own initiative
· Students with Academic Choice (AC) experience tend to prefer more challenging tasks and complete more of those tasks
· AC experiences support intrinsic motivation to learn

II. When students make choices about what and/or how to learn, they think harder and use more academic skills.

· AC enhances problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
· Those with AC experience show greater persistence in staying with difficult tasks and tend to set intrinsically motivated learning goals
· AC enhances creativity
· AC leads to more self-initiated editing and revision of work; more personal application of learning to students’ lives (transfer); and better organization, understanding, and ability to isolate variables in science experiments.

III. When students make choices about what and/or how to learn, they are more likely to behave in constructive ways and develop more friendships with a wider range of classmates.

· Taking initiative and making decisions has been shown to correlate with students’ attempts to solve problems through independent discussion reasoning (rather than tattling and fighting)
· Use of even minimal AC correlates with decreased disruptive behavior during AC times.
· In in-depth study of boy with significant learning and behavior issues, use of AC was associated with increases in student friendship and academic performance

[5] Build Students’ Skill in Self-Evaluation
Jalongo’s fifth recommendation focuses on the importance of “self-evaluation [as] a major mechanism for building intrinsic motivation.” Jalongo’s point here is simple: “If learners exercise control over when to move on to the next challenge, it helps build confidence and avert failure.” This, she argues, is one of the reasons children demonstrate such a passion for electronic games: “These learning situations put children in control and allow them to adjust and evaluate their performance.” In short, “self-evaluation is a major mechanism for building intrinsic motivation.”

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These five recommendations gain their chief importance as strategies for and approaches to cultivating in our students those "building blocks" that Dan Pink describes in his TED talk and his upcoming book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

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Motivation and Learning

What do author Dan Pink and Professor of Education Mary Renck Jalongo have in common?

A studied and compelling interest in motivation--and what both inspires and sustains it. Taken together, their core concepts and principles place motivation squarely in the center of learning and creativity. And while they approach motivation from very different contexts--Pink from the world of business and Jalongo from the world of children's education--they offer surprisingly complementary explanations of the nature of motivation--and, equally important, wonderfully complementary answers to the fundamental question: What motivates us to learn?



In his TED International Talk on "The Surprising Science of Motivation," author Dan Pink presents what appears to be an 18-minute precis of his upcoming book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. In brief, Pink argues that "there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does" when it comes to motivating workers. And what does science know? Well, Pink has done his homework (along with extensive research, citing a staggering array of studies both national and international, including one by The United States Federal Reserve) and he notes that science knows three crucial things when it comes to motivation:

[1] Traditional extrinsic motivators do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances (i.e., simple, routine, linear tasks that do not involve problem solving or creativity--exactly the sorts of tasks that can be outsourced).

[2] Carrot and Stick/If-Then Rewards often squelch and even punish creativity. The prospect of a reward or punishment tends to focus thinking to the point of narrowing (or limiting) it and making the consideration of a wide variety of possibilities and perspectives less likely.

[3] The secret to high performance in 21st century tasks involving problem solving, innovation and creativity isn't rewards or punishments but the intrinsic drive to do things because they are meaningful and they matter.

If what we want is high performance in the area of 21st century tasks--those that involve creativity, problem solving, and conceptual agility and flexibility--then the old carrot and stick approach of reward and punishment is not the way to go. Specifically, Pink identifies three "building blocks" for the "new operating system of business"--building blocks that I believe apply equally well to teaching and learning in the 21st century:

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Enter Mary Renck Jalongo. Now, Professor Jalongo's Association of Childhood Education International (ACEI) position paper "Beyond Benchmarks and Scores: Reasserting the Role of Motivation and Interest in Children's Academic Achievement" moves far beyond the area of motivation. (In fact, the article contains the basic framework for an entire graduate course of study on translating learning theory into classroom practice. Truth is, if you have time to read only one educational research article this year, you couldn't possibly do better than this one.) But motivation is central to the piece--just as it is central to children's learning. Jalongo writes,

"Motivation refers to the reasons that individuals take action; motivation to learn is a current or recurrent desire to gain information, develop skills , and attain mastery."

Jalongo's analysis and synthesis of the research on the roles of interest and motivation in learning pivot on the following 12 concepts and principles:

+ Interest represents "an integration of feelings, motivation, and cognition" and "is arguably the most important form of intrinsic motivation." Interest is a sine qua non of learning.

+ Research on interest can be divided into three categories:

Situational Interest: a spontaneous and short-lived interest based on novelty, the child's curiosity or salient information from the experience itself (e.g., dissection of an owl pellet)

Individual Interest: unique to the individual and an enduring preference for a specific subject, topic, concepts or an activity. The basis for this kind of interest appears to be "prior knowledge, personal experience, level of skill and the emotions associated with the learning topic or experience."

Instructional Facilitation of Interest: the relative effectiveness of efforts by educators to engage the learners through attention to situational and/or individual interests.

+ "Intrinsic motivation results when the learning activity is rewarding in itself because it is interesting, exciting, challenging or otherwise engaging or meaningful."

+ "When learners see themselves as competent--or as capable of becoming competent--at a task, their intrinsic motivation increases."

+ "The teacher survival skill of our era just may be connecting interesting tasks to worthwhile academic achievement goals and, by so doing, increasing student motivation to learn."

+ Learners are motivated to learn when "they can reconcile the perceived value (i.e., reasons for doing/learning something) with the cost (i.e., expenditure of effort and emotional investment required to accomplish the learning)."

+ "When learners are interested, they are better able to focus attention, have more positive feelings about the learning experience, and are more likely to store the learning in long-term memory."

+ "The key is to set the level of difficulty at the point where the learner needs to stretch a bit and can accomplish the task with moderate support"--what Vygotsky termed the zone of proximal development.

+ "High ability matched with high challenge results in an optimal learning experience, low ability and high challenge results in frustration, and high ability and low challenge results in boredom"--all related to Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow.

+ "Rewards have been found to increase motivation and interest in tasks that are of initial low interest."

+ "Although it is common to think of motivation as either extrinsic or intrinsic, it actually exists on a sort of continuum ranging from motives that are apart from the self to those that are deep within. . .So intrinsic motivation is not the 'ideal' while extrinsic is the 'real'; rather, the two can be reconciled and work in concert to motivate academic achievement."

+ "Instructional designs that promote motivation and interest emphasize three important variables:

1) autonomy--learners are given some options and leeway in the learning process so that they see the connections between their personal values and the environment;

2) competence: learners receive timely and useful feedback on their learning processes and success;

3) social relatedness--teachers accept and respect their students, thereby creating a supportive and relaxed learning atmosphere that encourages loyalty and cooperation."

Worth considering is this: How do Pink's notions of autonomy, mastery and purpose relate to Jalongo's ideas about interest and motivation?

In a nutshell, when educators focus on students' interests--and, in the process cultivate autonomy, competence and social relatedness--we leverage our students' feelings, motivation and cognition. And it is this combination of feelings, motivation and cognition that is the source of inspiring learning.

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In the follow-up to this post, we will explore Jalongo's 5 recommendations for supporting children in reaching their full learning potential.

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Learning from Our Digital Natives

On October 13, we committed a professional development day to the exploration of the following question:

Preparing Our Students for a Future We Can’t Predict: What Do the Arts and Technology Have to Do with 21st Century Learning and Leading?

Over the coming months, my blog entries will occasionally focus on different aspects of this professional development day—and the many experiences and opportunities that have followed, and will continue to follow, from it.

One of the remarkable gifts of that day was a two-part presentation by a Carnegie Mellon sophomore named Anthony Chivetta—a presentation that Anthony made from his dorm room using Skype (video conferencing technology). In the first half of his presentation, we focused on Anthony’s thought-provoking video piece entitled “Three Lessons from High School.” I encourage you to click on the link and experience the presentation. It’s all of nine minutes, and worth every second.

For those who want to cut to the chase, Anthony’s three lessons were:

[1] Value the human relationships in your life.
• Give people the benefit of the doubt.
• Let people show their good side.
• Don’t be afraid to be amazed.
• Respect who people are.
• Don’t force people to choose you over other passions.
• Friends make things possible.

[2] Take pride in your work.
• The work we do is a projection of ourselves.
• Our lives are the sum of the actions we take.

[3] Find a role and do it well.
• “Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”
• There is nothing more rewarding than finding a job and doing it well.
• Be the person you want and would dare to be—and enjoy every minute of it.

The second half of Anthony’s presentation featured a piece entitled “Making Learning Relevant Through Expression.” Key points?

• We have moved from a read-only to a read/write culture.
• As teachers, how will you take advantage of your students’ desire to create?
• What do authentic “artifacts of learning” look like?
• How do you move in a classroom from information to knowledge to presentation (by students)?
• Are your students proud of their work? Should they be? What if they were?
• How do your students measure their self-worth?

The first half of Anthony’s presentation created the context for the second half. And in just 45 minutes, a 19 year-old college student, precisely the kind of digital native so brilliantly described in Palfrey and Gasser’s Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, both challenged and inspired an entire faculty to embrace their students’ fundamental human desire & capacity to create through the arts and technology.

When asked what he thought made his generation different, perhaps, from previous generations, Anthony answered simply,

“As a generation, we have come to expect to design and create the world around us. And we can do so—including IN school—through the arts and technology, and often through a combination of the two.”

Anthony’s essential question for educators?

“How do you tap into your students’ desire to create and use that desire to make classroom activities more relevant and meaningful for them?”

Now that’s a question worth pursuing.

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