I'm Skeptical: Engagement and Motivation

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

NOTE: I will be on vacation through next week. There will (probably) be no posts until July 9th.

After last week’s I’m Skeptical: Science of Reading post went on for more than 8000 words, I’ve decided to keep this week’s post mercifully short. As always, when I say that I’m skeptical of one of the big ideas influencing education, I don’t mean the idea is necessarily wrong. Maybe it’s not well thought out, needs more/better data, or relies on a faulty understanding of how humans work. Today’s topic is, I think, that last one.

Engagement and Motivation

The first post I made here on Substack was about phones in school. I wanted to explain why, when it seems obviously bad today, schools were so eager to embrace bringing smartphones into classrooms. One of the things we (also me, as someone being trained to go into teaching at that time) were told was that technology was inherently engaging for students. Because they were “digital natives” and because technology is designed for engagement, any lesson that incorporated phones and the internet and video and whatever else was new at the time (Second Life, iirc) would automatically engage students. Since the most highly engaged students also had the best test scores and the highest academic achievement, this was seen as a win-win. Moreover, because students from minority populations were less engaged, we had to do everything possible to close the engagement gap. And, crucially, it is the teachers’ job to keep students engaged. These arguments are still made. Just use Google’s Jamboard or Flip and kids will “ask questions, comment on their peers’ ideas, take notes, read out loud, post in online classroom discussion threads, and probe deeply into what they’re reading”.

If you followed those links to Jamboard and Flip, you’ll see one of the problems with a lot of the technology suggestions. There’s a larger problem, however, with the overall theory of action as it relates to student learning. In all of these examples, the research suggests engagement is highly correlated with good outcomes. I think that is true. What the research does not tell us is which direction the causality flows. Are students becoming engaged and then achieving good outcomes or are students achieving good outcomes and then becoming engaged. Proponents of engagement and motivation pretty much always assume it’s the first: develop engagement and outcomes will follow. What if the opposite were actually true? What if students only developed motivation and a sense of engagement because they were successful in school? What if what kids really need is the knowledge and skills to succeed because that also pays psychological and social dividends that we measure as engagement and motivation? These questions are the source of my skepticism.

Is New Stuff Inherently Engaging?

Fans of Betteridge’s law can guess what I’m going to say but I think it’s important to actually take a broader view here of the tendency to say tech is inherently engaging because it tells us something important about how we think about engagement. Let’s begin with the point that researchers have long been critical of the idea that the medium through which instruction is delivered has any causal relationship to engagement. I’m tempted to go back as far as the 1920s and look at researchers’ attempts to understand the value of motion pictures and film slides in the classroom. Revesz & Hazewinkel in the British Journal of Psychology published The Didactic Value of Lantern Slide Films in 1924. Edward Thorndike recommended teachers use pictures as much as possible a decade earlier than that. Four our purposes, though, the 1980s will do. Richard Clark reviewed a variety of studies and meta-analyses of media use in classrooms and felt the evidence was lacking. He’s not pulling any punches either.

Media comparison studies are, broadly, studies that compare outcomes of students who are instructed in some way via media with students who are not. What Clark found over forty years ago echoes some of what we’re seeing today. Studies that purport to show using new media leads to academic gains are often conducted in such a way that other meaningful changes are also made and also could have an effect on the outcome. So, a study showing a big gain for learners in El Salvador using television instruction doesn’t account for changes in curriculum and instruction that also occurred concomitantly with the televised instruction. Sounds familiar. Moreover, Clark includes some helpful historical analysis that will sound at home here on Scholastic Alchemy.

Among the key factors evaluated by these studies and analyses were student engagement and student motivation. Clark notes that the idea behind much of this media use was that students would be more engaged by slides, films, radio, television, and computer learning thus achieving more. His review suggests otherwise but it seems like we haven’t paid attention to his warnings over the last 40 years.

Causal in which direction?

More recent studies of motivation help us get to a clearer view of where this confusion may be coming from. Garron-Cerrier et. al. (2016) followed almost 1,500 elementary school children for four years, assessing their intrinsic motivation toward math and comparing their scores in math over time. The authors find that “[c]ontrary to the hypothesis that motivation and achievement are reciprocally associated over time, our results point to a directional association from prior achievement to subsequent intrinsic motivation”. This is pretty important because, based on this research, being a motivated and engaged student did not predict subsequent achievement in mathematics. They also found that intrinsic motivation declined over time for girls in the study even though their math achievement remained stable and even gained on the boys’ achievement levels. The takeaway here is that the causality seems to flow in one direction: from high achievement to high motivation.

A subsequent review of the literature on motivation and achievement argues that causality simply can’t be sufficiently claimed in either direction by the studies that exist now.

Digital Natives 2: Multitasking Boogaloo?

One centerpiece to today’s theories of student engagement and motivation is the idea that students are already interested in and fluent with new tools such as AI and short-form video. A decade or so ago we would have called these kids digital natives. That is, digital technologies are their native environment because they’ve grown up with them and are used to having them. But the idea of the digital native went beyond that. People seriously argued that digital natives had different brains than their non-digial peers and had acquired special cognitive processes to manage multiple flows of information simultaneously. We, as teachers, had to create instruction that embedded multiple flows of information so as to better engage students. It was all wrong.

Yet, here we are facing a world where we’re being told to incorporate yet another novel technology into our teaching in order to keep students engaged. They’re using ChatGPT anyway, so it will help them if they can use ChatGPT in class. If you can keep students engaged and motivated to do work, we are told, then they will get better grades and perform better on tests. At no point does anyone talk about how kids may feel more engaged and more motivated if they had already been good at school and found success in prior years. I’m sure we’ll see a new version of the digital native soon. Maybe the AI Native or the Articially Intelligent Child or something even more marketable. Engagement will be the justification for years of bad policies, just like it was with phones. It is, after all, scholastic alchemy.

Thanks for reading!