How can instructors bridge the gap between students' motivation and how they value the course material?
Students are more likely to pay attention to and retain information if it is paired with a salient exciting event. This can be neurochemical - like a cup of coffee - or shocking - like a gorilla walking through a basketball game. For in-person and e-Learning activities interactivity and variable rewards (Howard-Jones Demetriou Bogacz Yoo & Leonards 2011) boost arousal motivation and memory retention.
Instructors can also:
- connect the material to students' interests
- provide authentic real-world tasks
- show how the material is relevant to students' current academic lives
- demonstrate the relevance of higher-level skills to students' professional lives
- identify and reward what is valued in class and
- display passion and enthusiasm themselves.
How can instructors create positive expectancies as students pursue course objectives?
- provide targeted feedback
- articulate expectations with tools like rubrics
- align educational goals instruction and assessment strategies
When students feel more supported receive feedback and demonstrate their knowledge they will have a clearer view of what is expected of them and will be more motivated as a consequence of the confidence and control they have in their learning. Teachers to prepare students for success can also
- describe effective study strategies and
- educate students about the ways we explain success and failure.
Students oriented toward a growth mindset and equipped with the skills to succeed are more likely to attribute their success to an internal locus of control and remain motivated. Students will adjust their expectations - that is to succeed - if they are given choices in terms of the specific knowledge they acquire via topics for papers and questions for class discussion.
Giving students time to reflect - asking them what they learned from an assignment or what the most valuable part of a project was to them - helps them to articulate strategies for success moving forward as they retrospectively review how they prepared what skills they used and what they can change moving forward.