The Key to Motivating Students--and Maybe Everyone Else Too

Students won’t learn unless they’re motivated. But the best way to motivate them is to enable them to experience achievement.

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

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Teachers try to motivate students in all sorts of ways: maximizing their choice of reading material, devising math problems that relate to their own lives, giving out gold stars, praising effort—even, perhaps, if the product itself isn’t praiseworthy. The theory is that if students are motivated, they’ll achieve at higher levels. So the first thing to do is find a way to motivate them.

But research described in the Science of Learning Substack (well worth subscribing to) casts doubt on that assumption. In a four-year experiment involving about 1500 elementary students, participants self-reported their motivation to learn math, and researchers monitored their math achievement through assessments. The finding? Achievement consistently predicted motivation, but motivation did not predict achievement. So the best way to motivate students may be to enable them to experience achievement.

Since we’re in the season of resolutions for the coming year, it’s worth noting that the same principle can also hold true outside school. Want to cultivate a good habit or reach a goal? Figure out a way to provide yourself with incremental achievements.

For example, Matt Yglesias recently wrote on his Substack that although he hates exercise, he’s motivated to engage in “super slow” weight training because it consistently measures small amounts of progress. “I leave the gym feeling accomplished and positive,” Yglesias reports, “and I’m ready to go back.”

Yglesias’s experience in the gym aligns with a framework for looking at motivation as the product of a positive feedback loop. Achievement yields a feeling of accomplishment, which in turn leads to an expectation that future learning will provide a similar reward. That provides the motivation for another round of achievement.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards

But there’s still the question of how you get that beneficial cycle going in the first place. Yglesias must have initially forced himself to go to the gym without having experienced that feeling of accomplishment. I don’t know what method he used, but teachers confronted with unmotivated students might resort to what are known as “extrinsic rewards.”

It’s become something of a shibboleth in education that intrinsic rewards—like the enjoyment of learning for its own sake—are more effective than extrinsic ones, like gold stars or even grades. If students’ goals are only to get A’s, their motivation is unlikely to last after they’ve gotten the reward.

Again, a recent scholarly article complicates that picture. Based on a review of the literature, the authors argue that we need to get away from the idea that extrinsic rewards are always bad and intrinsic ones always good. (Hat tip to Greg Ashman’s Substack Filling the Pail, which I also recommend highly, for alerting me to the article.)

The authors observe that offering students extrinsic rewards can be an effective way of helping unmotivated students initiate a positive feedback loop. Once learners start to engage with a task, even if it’s for the gold star or whatever the teacher is dangling, they get the opportunity to experience its intrinsic rewards—like a feeling of accomplishment—which can lead to “motivation transformation.” Now they’re learning because they’ve discovered they enjoy it.

Of course, that assumes learners are experiencing success—which isn’t always the case. If students initially or repeatedly encounter failure, that positive feedback loop may never get going or may stall. So what can teachers do to help ensure the experience of achievement that leads to motivation?

Clear Teaching Leads to Motivation

Another study, also discussed in the Science of Learning post, suggests an answer. Researchers randomly assigned 252 students to one of two “text-based lessons,” one clear and the other unclear. Afterwards, students answered questions, including one about how motivated they were to learn the material, and took a test based on the content. The students who got the clear lesson not only did better on the test but also reported being more motivated.

So if you want to motivate students, it really helps to make your teaching as clear as possible. Clear teaching involves using evidence-based principles like providing concrete examples of problems before asking students to solve them independently, structuring lessons in a logical and coherent way, and ensuring students have opportunities to practice recalling information they’ve recently learned. All of this helps reduce cognitive load, which can impede comprehension, analysis, and learning in general.

There’s plenty of evidence that applying these principles can boost student achievement, so it makes sense that it would lead to higher motivation as well. Still, I see a few caveats.

One, which is noted by the authors of the article on extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, is that it’s easier to know when to start providing extrinsic rewards than when to stop. When the positive feedback loop cycle hasn’t started, or when it gets stuck—because a student has stopped experiencing achievement—extrinsic rewards are useful. But if the cycle is working, dangling that gold star could just gum up the works. Students might ask themselves if they’re engaging in the task just for the reward, undermining their intrinsic motivation.

Another caveat is that while we do want students to experience achievement, we don’t want to make things too easy for them. If students find a task effortless, they won’t feel they’ve accomplished anything—and they’ll be right, since learning requires effort. The goal should be to modulate cognitive load so that it’s manageable rather than eliminate it. Students might also get bored with a task that’s too easy.

How to Motivate “Higher-Order” Thinking

Applying scientific findings to classroom practice is rarely straightforward, but it’s easier to see how all this might work with some subjects than with others. Providing “worked examples” can help students grasp math concepts, and teaching phonics in a systematic way can help beginning readers understand the “alphabetic principle.” In both cases, students can experience those incremental successes that motivate them to continue. But how do you get that positive cycle going with, say, an analysis of characters in a novel, or an explanation of the causes of World War II?

Clear teaching is important, of course, no matter what the subject is. Students need a grasp of the plot of a novel or the facts of historical events, and explicit, interactive teaching will help ensure they get it. Frequent low-stakes quizzes can provide both retrieval practice, which consolidates learning, and a feeling of accomplishment.

But what about “higher-order” thinking tasks like analysis? Understanding and retaining factual information is a necessary foundation for those tasks, but students may need explicit guidance to engage in them—and the opportunity to experience success, so that they stay motivated.

I’d say the best bet is to teach students to write about what they’re learning—in an explicit, manageable way. Writing can be a powerful lever for deepening knowledge and fostering analytical abilities, but it also imposes a crushing cognitive load on inexperienced writers. That’s undoubtedly a major reason so many students are unmotivated to write.

If, however, they get enough guidance and collective practice, beginning at the sentence level, before they’re expected to write independently, students can begin to experience the sense of achievement that triggers a positive feedback loop. Not only will they be motivated to write, but the writing they engage in will boost their learning—leading to more achievement, and therefore to more motivation.