Motivation Killer

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

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Means, Motive, and Opportunity

I’ve been thinking more about motivation this week for a couple of reasons. Monday’s reads included reference to Kirshner, Hendrick, and Heal’s recent book about instructional illusions. One of those illusions is the illusion of motivation, in which teachers and school leaders convince themselves that creating motivated students is a prerequisite for academic achievement. I’ve made similar points in the past about motivation being downstream from academic success, rather than the other way around. In a newsletter post, Kirshner explains it like this:

Another reason motivation has been on my mind is that my wife and I have been rewatching 90s suspense/thrillers recently and just finished Primal Fear. It’s good but a bit transparent. If anything, the closing twist helps extricate the movie from a problematic representation of mental illness. Anyway, one of the things hammered early on by the attorney played by Richard Gere is that the state can’t prove motive. His client has no motive for killing the victim, so the overall theory of the prosecution’s case rests on shaky ground. If the defendant doesn’t have a reason to kill, it’s unlikely given his overall character and demeanor, that he would be a killer. The plot of the move largely revolves around revealing that he did have motive, but I won’t spoil it for you. Rather, let’s hit that point about motive again. In a criminal case, motive is seen as a prerequisite to action. It’s the “why” that drives someone to kill, harm, or steal and gives investigators some insight as to the psychology of the suspect. It only seems natural that a motive may function similarly in other contexts as a prerequisite for action.

Which brings me to the third reason I’ve been thinking about motivation, a post by Peter Greene positing that the “8th grade slump” in test scores may be an artifact of 8th graders psychological and emotional motivation. He’s commenting on the Mississippi Miracle and the stubbornly low 8th grade reading scores there. I’m more than happy to keep the 4th grade scores at arm’s length at this point — it’s been covered enough, including by me. The way Greene frames it is as a problem of motivation and something that is going on with students’ development at that age.

Greene isn’t alone in thinking this way. Andy Spears concurs. This would appear to be the same structure of motivation as the courtroom: kids get motivated and then take the test seriously. Part of the flaw in our system of testing, Greene and Spears argue, is that lots of kids just don’t care enough to try on the tests so the measure we’re getting is one of effort and motivation, not of knowledge or skills. Again, this all feels true. I’ve had this thought many times over the years (as a high school teacher primarily working with 9th graders back in the day, I experienced much of the same disinterest in testing). How, though, do we fit these two perspectives together?

Goal Motivated

One of my colleagues (she has a great tiktok!) from back in the doctoral days reminded me recently of the nuance that situates motivation within a larger context for learning. That had me going back and reviewing a chapter on motivation from the book, How Learning Works. One thing made clear early on with the vignettes Ambrose et al. use as exemplars is that educators make incorrect assumptions about their students when their students don’t perform well. In their attempts to motivate students, “both think hard about how to motivate their students, yet they make the common — and often flawed — assumption that their students would be motivated in much the same ways that they themselves were as students. When their students are not similarly motivated, the instructors conclude that they are apathetic or lazy” (p.68). In one example, the teacher’s own love of the content is not share by the students who do not find it relevant or interesting. In the other example, the teacher’s admonition about the difficulty of the content demotivates the students by making trying feel futile.

Drawing on a variety of research, Ambrose and colleagues explain in the chapter that motivation is the product of two things: subjective value and expectancy. What I think a lot of people miss, though, is that there is still one more intermediate layer between motivation and accomplishing something: goals. When you read the chapter, it’s clear that both subjective value and expectancy are modulated by goals. This is because the goal is what the student is motivated to do, or in the case of 8th graders taking standardized tests, not do. Ambrose & co:

Subjective value is where Greene and Spears are finding problems with students’ test taking. They, I think correctly, see that many students place little value on these tests and exhibit little effort because the test doesn’t do anything meaningful for them. In more specific terms, we might say that speeding through the test by inputting only answer “C” or putting your head down is accomplishing an affective goal for the student that they place more value on than whatever they see the test’s goal as. It’s really hard to convince students to place high value on schoolwork and especially on tests. It’s becoming even harder as it’s easier than ever for kids to engage in digital alternatives that satisfy affective and social goals.

Expectancy, meanwhile, refers to the sense that a learner expects to succeed at accomplishing a goal.

Expectancies are further broken down into two components. First, they need to expect that a positive outcome is even possible. Second, they need to believe they are capable of the task at hand. While I suspect some of the phenomenon Greene and Spears identify is also low expectancy, this is the area where I mostly think science of learning advocates like Kirshner and Hendrick are operating. They’re pointing out that kids need to experience some academic success via good instructional practices so that they expect to be successful and are therefore motivated. Kirshner and Hendrick don’t talk much about how to get kids to value their schoolwork, though, and I’d like to know more about how they would approach kids who place low subjective value on schooling.

In the end, though, what becomes clear is that the crux of motivation is the goal and that kids need to place value on achieving academic goals and expect that they can accomplish those goals. If we only see that relationship as flowing one way, from motivation to achievement, we miss how achievement feeds back into motivation forming a virtuous cycle. We also may miss that the kids simply don’t place value on something and won’t put effort toward it.

Environmental Motivation

Where I think Kirshner’s explanation of the motivation illusion is really good is that closing bit at the end. Here it is again.

What Kirshner is talking about here is something that Ambrose et al. also mention: support. Namely, the classroom environment needs to be supportive in meaningful ways, e.g. not just telling kids why something matters or lecturing on grit. A lot depends on students’ perception of the learning environment as supportive.

Now, Ambrose and colleagues are using examples from higher education, but what they say is equally true for all ages. What Kirshner and the SOL community add here, though, is the (I think) correct point that it’s not just the soft social stuff like a teacher’s approachability that matters. Lessons and units need to be structured to be approachable, to put students in a position where they know what to do next and where to turn for answers. Put another way, the learning task needs to be legible to the students so they can navigate through it. This may mean some explicit instruction and guided reading to lay a groundwork for subsequent independent work which then gets reinforced with some retrieval practice. As students become fluent in the factual and procedural basis for their work, they can begin pursuing inquiries and creative work more independently. This structure is also part of that supportive environment.

Here’s another chart, this time actually from Ambrose et al.

Hardly Motivated

Okay, this is all fine and dandy but, really, what do you do when you have that kid who has a low expectation of efficacy, places little value on the work, and who isn’t responding to your supportive environment? I wish I had a satisfying answer but I think I’m going to have to simply say it’s hard! Grabbing those kids who are rejecting, evading, defiant, or hopeless is going to be something of an idiosyncratic process that depends on all kinds of factors. While it may seem like I’m straying into one of Kirshner’s illusions, the illusion of uniqueness, I’m really not. Rather, I the answer to this problem comes to us through the experience of teaching and the knowledge educators build from that experience.

Adrian Neibauer’s recent spring break reflection reminds us that teachers generate an exceptional kind of knowledge often overlooked by policymakers and curriculum experts, pedagogical content knowledge.

Teaching requires pedagogical knowledge, patience, and effective communication. These are skills developed and refined over years of teaching, learning, and reflecting on one’s pedagogical practice. Teachers become masterful professionals over time.

I think motivation is another area where something like pedagogical content knowledge is in effect. It takes an experienced professional to know how to connect content, curriculum, and pedagogy and it takes an experienced professional to “read” a kid’s behavior and respond appropriately. When I discovered one of the 6th graders I was working with never completed her homework or readings because she took care of younger siblings while her mother worked, there wasn’t some evidence-based principle of lesson design that I turned to. You can have all the SOL-endorsed supports in the world but if that kid’s house burned down or they’ve been out sick from a measles outbreak, they probably won’t be super motivated. This is where those soft skills, that warm and welcoming classroom environment come in. This is where only an experienced educator will know how to respond because it’s something you learn when you’re forced to confront it. Since we don’t all confront the same challenges, we learn different ways of responding to different crises.

None of that is a knock on Kirshner & co or some takedown of the science of learning, which provides us with an absolutely essential understanding of learning and toolkit to make it happen. Instead, see it as a limitation of the classroom as a classroom and an acknowledgement that our classrooms are also their own societies and microcosms of society at large. We may wish to close our door but the whole world is coming in anyway. Motivation, expectancy, value, goals, and environment all have to be seen in light of the social contexts of any classroom and the larger societal contexts in which we all live. Teachers do all of that every day.

Thanks for reading!