Why is motivation important for students

For instance, motivation can:. Most importantly, motivation urges to us perform an action. Without it, completing the action can be hard or even impossible. Children thrive when there is structure and struggle when there is chaos. When students sense or see that classes follow a structure, and the curriculum and class materials have been prepared beforehand, it provides them with a greater sense of security. The feeling of security is one of our basic needs. To help students feel more secure, educators need to plan classes and curriculums.

All materials that will be used in class should be prepared in advance. Educators can also state the objectives of a course or class at the beginning of a semester or a class. If a student has a negative emotion such as fear or disliking towards their teacher, that can negatively affect their attitude toward the subject as a whole.

If a teacher shows a preference towards certain students or uses derogatory and humiliating language, that can lower their motivation in education. Students are more likely to retain their motivation in education if educators use different teaching methods.

That creates diversity and prevents students from getting bored. Students in a single class are likely to have different styles of learning. Thus, a teacher is more likely to meet these needs by applying different teaching methods. Another important aspect, especially when it comes to girls in STEM subjects , is ensuring that the knowledge or skills learned can be practically applied in real life.

Quite a few parental habits can indirectly affect the motivation of children, intrinsic motivation in particular. As a result, they are more likely to flip the learning on its head to see it from a new angle. Motivated students are not more intelligent than unmotivated students, but their need to find out the answer to a question or to master a concept pushes their thinking. Intrinsically motivated students will think about questions far beyond the confines of the classroom, because the presence of the teacher or the fear of a low grade are not the underlying drivers for their thinking.

Therefore, motivated students, by virtue of thinking longer and harder and enjoying the challenge of being confused, will ask deeper, more thought-provoking questions. Motivated students are more able to adapt learned content to new situations because they tend to reflect on underlying causes or frameworks. When a student is truly engrossed in a task, they have less cognitive and emotional energy to focus on social image.

Individuals who engage in intrinsically motivating activities report that their self-consciousness and other stressors tends to fade for the period of the activity. Because intrinsically motivated students are not driven by fear of failure or criticism, they are less likely to disengage in such circumstances. With that said, every student does feel the demotivating effects of negative feedback, even if driven students experience them to a lesser extent. Agency and motivation are inextricably linked concepts because, as a student becomes more driven to reach a goal, they consequently develop a stronger sense of purpose in directing their energy towards that goal.

When it comes to educational attainment, highly motivated students find a way to forge their own path and tend to be skeptical of the limitations set by others. As professionals, motivated individuals also tend to be skeptical of established ideas or rules of the field, and instead constantly challenge themselves by experimenting with new ideas.

While the above theories may differ in emphasis, each can support student motivation through the following practical applications.

Practise growth mindset. Students who feel like they will improve through hard work will exert more effort than those who believe that their success is based on intelligence. Making a conscious effort to provide wait time also removes the pressure of needing to be the first to find the answer. When students come to realise that their teacher will always wait 5 seconds or so before calling on a student rather than always calling on the first hand up, they will be more likely to engage with the struggle of thinking through the problem.

Finally, by keeping the emphasis on progress rather than scores, growth mindset pushes students to continually challenge themselves and reflect on their improvement. Encourage self-efficacy. Students who are paralysed by low academic self-confidence will struggle to drive their own motivation. A sense of competence is enhanced through optimal challenges. As the student practises this new skill or concept, the teacher slowly removes their structured support, making it more and more difficult.

This slow removal of support, paired with positive reinforcement and opportunities to receive support along the way, keeps students at this level of optimal challenge as they improve.

Consistent small successes will further enhance motivation. Students often base their view of their own competence on how they believe their teacher views them. Therefore, teacher observations of student effort encourage a sense of competence, as well as pointing out how far the student has come in their learning. When students have a firm sense that they are regarded as competent, they will be more likely to treat learning like play, making mistakes and taking risks.

Threats and unyielding deadlines tend to diminish this orientation towards play-like learning. Students may give up because they falsely believe that, if they were going to succeed, it would be easy. Teachers can disentangle this misconception by providing examples of failures that well-known individuals overcame along their journey towards success. Emphasising the value of asking for help may catch students who are falling behind and becoming disengaged from the material.

Finally, modeling the struggle through your own words and actions can be a powerful example to students. A pressure to compete tends to diminish motivation unless the two students are and perceive themselves to be equally competent: if a student at the top of the class is pitted against a student who is struggling, the latter student may feel that there is no reason to try.

This is not to say that class or school-wide competitions should be avoided. When broader competitions are more open-ended, students can creatively self-guide their projects, and will feel a stronger sense of intrinsic motivation.

Differentiating tasks so they are appropriately challenging allows students to maintain optimal engagement. When students are working just within their current ability, they are drawn in by their curiosity to find the answer and spurred by the belief that they can find the answer.

Teachers can also encourage students to set authentic learning goals rather than performance goals. Students can practise using mastery-orientation language when writing weekly, monthly, or long-term goals. Teachers can reinforce mastery-orientation by modeling it in their own goal setting. Despite the popular idea that fidgets or music support student focus, brains generally need quiet or ambient noise to stay engaged.

Higher level brain functions such as creativity and critical thinking are inextricably linked to a state of flow, so students who are constantly interrupted will never be able to reach this level of highly motivated thinking. Therefore, independent and collaborative work should occur at separate times, or in separate spaces if they must occur simultaneously.

Some learning is simply not particularly interesting, and no amount of differentiation can make every learning experience enjoyable for every student all of the time. External rewards such as long-term career goals and teacher approval are realistic external rewards that teachers can use. However, when deciding whether to use external motivation, it is important to keep certain principles in mind.

Tangible rewards are often counterproductive, and the more external the reward, the less inherently valuable the student will find the activity. Even when students complete an activity for the inherent value they see in it, and are given an unexpected reward, they later regard their motivation for doing the activity as more extrinsically motivated than students who were not given a reward.

Students who believe that they can succeed are more likely to reach their goals. However, it is important that students consider what may go wrong in order to avoid being emotionally devastated when they encounter setbacks.

In fact, letting students know that they will encounter setbacks, and that they are entirely normal, takes away some of their sting in the moment. In addition, students who consider hurdles before taking on a challenge are able to make a plan regarding how to continue moving forward. It is deeply valuable to emphasise to students that obstacles will always come up, but that what is important is to learn from these obstacles rather than to dwell on them.

While formal school-wide social-emotional assessments are valuable for collecting comprehensive data, these measures are time-consuming and cannot practically be implemented more than once or twice each year.

For these formal assessments, one reliable measure with strong evidence of validity is the Panorama Social-Emotional Learning Survey. However, on a fortnightly or monthly basis, teachers can informally gauge student motivation by asking the following questions:. How often do you do the following? These questions are suitable for verbal or written check-ins. When scoring written check-ins, items 4, 6, and 7 should be reverse-scored.

It is also prudent to consider not only the level of motivation a student has but their form of motivation. Is the student more intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, or somewhere in between?

With this knowledge, we can use the above strategies to nudge the students towards more internal motivation by developing their sense of competency and control over their learning, as well as doing what we can to draw students in with interesting content. Anderman, E. In Handbook of research on student engagement pp. Springer: Boston, MA. Deci, E. Motivation and education: The self-determination perspective. Educational psychologist , 26 , How do we expect to encourage more students to become engineers, nurses, or any other occupation if learning the necessary skills becomes less interesting and motivating over time?

These questions should give us pause. But it's the second problem that usually gets everyone's attention. Motivation is not only important in its own right; it is also an important predictor of learning and achievement. Students who are more motivated to learn persist longer, produce higher quality effort, learn more deeply, and perform better in classes and on standardized tests. Given the key role that student motivation plays in learning, making school more meaningful for students seems vital to educational reform.

My colleagues and I—at the University of Virginia's Motivate Lab and elsewhere including Judy Harackiewicz and Hannah Gaspard among others —have been developing and testing a particular value intervention for more than 15 years. Our strategy is to help students discover personal connections between their lives and what they are learning.

Although some details of the value intervention vary by study, the basics are the same: Students are prompted to briefly reflect on how the topics they're learning in class relate to some important aspect of their lives, such as future goals, personal interests, or significant others.

We have tested our intervention with thousands of students from middle school, high school , and college , and in a broad range of subjects. What we find is that not only does this intervention stop the decline of motivation , but it raises student achievement. This is because many teachers confuse the value they find in the topic with the value that a student finds in a topic. Our third-grade son valued learning new and interesting things and hanging out with his friends.

His teacher valued preparing students for high school.