Student Motivation and Engagement

Student motivation is associated with higher well-being, persistence, and achievement (Bureau et al., 2021), but different components and types of motivation are differently related to student success. “Intrinsic motivation is related to student success and well-being, whereas personal value (identified regulation) is particularly highly related to persistence.” However, “Motivation driven by a desire to obtain rewards or avoid punishment (external regulation) was not associated to performance or persistence but was associated with decreased well-being” (Howard et al., 2021).

Myths about Motivation

Here are some myths and facts about motivation from the American Psychological Association:

See more about cultivating a growth mindset in the teaching section.

Self-Determination Theory

Self-determination theory has determined three necessary components of motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness, that apply to education, the workplace, parenting, and other contexts.

• Autonomy is about having control over one’s life and choices. It contrasts with controlled motivation, which involves being told what to do.
  • Autonomy-supportive teaching behaviors have a positive impact on both students and instructors (Reeve, 2016; Reeve & Cheon, 2021), including: take the students’ perspective, vitalize inner motivational resources, provide explanatory rationales, acknowledge and accept negative affect, rely on informational and non-pressuring language, and display patience.
  • Assessments that support autonomy have positive outcomes, whereas controlled motivation assessments that involve surface learning have negative outcomes (Kursurkar et al., 2023).
• Competence involves the need to experience mastery, a sense that one can succeed and grow.
  • If tasks are too challenging or a person receives negative feedback, feelings of competence can decrease.
  • The need for competence is best satisfied within well-structured environments that afford optimal challenges, positive feedback, and opportunities for growth (Ryan & Deci, 2020).
• Relatedness concerns a sense of belonging and connection, and being respected and cared for.
  • Connection with others is a basic human need and fundamental component of motivation. The section below on student well-being goes into more details and strategies for fostering student motivation and belonging.
  • “Students from marginalized groups are often expected to learn in exclusionary spaces where they are not valued or authentically included. In these spaces, it may be impossible for them to belong” (Student Experience Research Network, 2020).

Teaching Strategies that Encourage Motivation

Fong (2022) identified four types of teaching strategies that can foster student motivation:

• Meaningful Choices involve providing students with a range of 3-5 options in assignments, encouraging self-directed learning while offering support and structure.
• Constructive Feedback includes specific praise, clear improvement directions, and multiple revision opportunities to build trust and mastery.
• Rationale Provision entails explaining the relevance and future benefits of course materials and assignments, helping students connect tasks to their goals.
• Social Belonging & Cultural Validation focuses on creating an inclusive environment, validating students’ diverse backgrounds, and promoting a culture of help-seeking and mastery. These strategies collectively nurture students’ intrinsic motivation and engagement.

More about Motivation and Belonging

• Motivation Myth Busters
• 3 ways to make ‘belonging’ more than a buzzword in higher ed
• Autonomy-supportive teaching: Its malleability, benefits, and potential to improve educational practice
• First-year retention improves with belonging exercises
• Where and with whom does a brief social-belonging intervention promote progress in college?
• Supporting students’ intrinsic motivation for online learning tasks: The effect of need-supportive task instructions on motivation, self-assessment, and task performance
• Measuring Belongingness in Higher Education: Assessing the Relevance of the University Belongingness Questionnaire (UBQ) in Community College Settings
• Student Retention: Fostering Peer Relationships Through a Brief Experimental Intervention
• Empower 2YC Students with Validation

Student Engagement

Engagement is an observable byproduct of motivation (Nagy et al., 2022) and includes cognitive, behavioral, and emotional responses, such as putting in effort, paying attention, attending class, participating in class, and completing coursework. Engagement is a key predictor of student outcomes, especially in online learning (Brown et al., 2022). A national survey of community college student engagement has found a positive relationship between student retention and five student engagement benchmarks: active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, and support for learners (Spitzig & Renner, 2022). There are however critiques of engagement as a concept (MacFarlane & Tomlinson, 2017), as it may sometimes be a superficial or artificial signal of genuine student motivation and learning.

See the teaching section for more resources on increasing student participation, attendance, and engagement, but below is information about two strategies: nudges and contextualized learning.

Nudges

Nudges are personalized text messages or emails to students to help remind them or encourage their success and make better decisions. These can also be accomplished by one-on-one meetings in person or in videoconferences or phone calls.

After an exam, for example, you might try sending tailored individualized messages to students who struggled (or else meet with them virtually or in person) and discuss study strategies and how to use the learning goals more effectively to target their studying. In a study of this technique, both students who had an in-person meeting with the instructor and those who only received an email improved their performance on the following exam.

More on Nudges

• You can Message Students Who from the Canvas gradebook to nudge students who perhaps did not do well on an exam or who did not turn in an assignment.
• Transforming the lowest-performing students: an intervention that worked
• How One Email From You Could Help Students Succeed
• Helping the Poor in Education: The Power of a Simple Nudge
• Online Resources for Teach Students How To Learn
• Tech Powers Real-Time, Personalized Feedback that Promotes Student Success
• Nudges tied to a boost in STEM students’ persistence at 2-year colleges, study finds
• To Improve Student Success, This University Tried ‘Nudging’ Its Professors
• The “Idea Advantage”: How Content Sharing Strategies Impact Engagement in Online Learning Platforms
• A conceptual framework to enhance student online learning and engagement in higher education
• The effectiveness of nudging key learning resources to support online engagement in higher education courses

Increasing Student Engagement with Everyday Examples & Problem-Based Learning

Situated learning, or contextualized learning, is the idea that all learning is inextricably tied to the context in which it happens – the activities, the physical and social context, and the culture in which learning occurs. Other related names for this principle include situated cognition, encoding specificity, culturally enhanced learning, and simulation. Embodied learning incorporates the body and embodied action as part of this learning context, as well.

Situated learning contrasts with abstract and decontextualized learning. Sometimes students may memorize formulas, write papers, or do well on standard tests of learning, but they do so without an understanding of the underlying concepts or purpose of the learning, and without transferring their learning to later courses, let alone to the real world.

Why Does this Matter?

One of the top issues some instructors often mention is a lack of engagement by some students. Some students seem to lack interest or motivation. Some students may also be unprepared to learn and succeed in the course. If you follow those links, you’ll see that one of the best strategies for increasing student motivation and engagement is to increase the relevance and connections of your assignments and activities to the real-world and future learning.

“Students who sense a disconnect between what they are learning at college (or in your course) and their future life, as they perceive it, will never engage to the same degree as students who understand the relevant connections between their current learning and their future.

One technique that a teacher can use to increase relevance is to repeatedly ask “So what?” or “Who cares?” If the teacher struggles to answer these questions from their students’ perspectives, there is little chance that the students will be able to make the connection on their own. The task of answering these questions does not necessarily need to rest solely on the teacher, though. An engaging teacher will consistently work with students to construct answers to these two questions based on what they are currently studying.”

A study of a contextualized math course at a community college shared some of the students’ experiences, including: “I Never Learned More in My Life in Such a Short Period of Time.” Another study found “a significant positive relationship between exposure to math contextualization and students’ outcome measures, including course performance, term GPA, continuous postsecondary enrollment, credential completion, and upward transfer.”

Below are some evidence-based techniques for increasing the relevance and real-world connections in your course to increase student engagement.

Contextualized Teaching Strategies

There are several teaching strategies based on the idea of situated learning that have helped students learn more deeply and transfer their learning to later courses and the real world, including:

• Problem-Based Learning
• Simulations
• Games
• Modeling
• Service Learning
• Challenge-Based Instruction
• Entrepreneurial-Minded Learning
• Project-Based Learning
• Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)
• Writing Across the Curriculum

Contextualizing Education with Everyday Examples

• ENGAGE Engineering – Everyday Examples in Engineering
• 100 Everyday Engineering Examples
• Wright State Model for Engineering Mathematics – Students took this engineering math class alongside Precalculus, and 89% went on to pass Calculus (C or higher), compared to 60% who did not take this engineering math course. Equity gaps based on math placement scores disappeared by graduation.
• Learning Mathematics in Context with Modeling and Technology