Motivation: The Achilles Heel of Learning
There are only a limited number of things staff can do ? interventions they can make or advice they can give ? which will affect motivation. Where there is no, or low, motivation in a student there is little or no learning. Paradoxically, where student motivation is high, students can overcome most difficulties, many deficiencies (in the teaching process) and some disasters.
The best projects undoubtedly result from real interest and enthusiasm on the part of the student. Traditionally it might be expected that intrinsic motivation is not a problem for students in higher education, and, indeed, for many this is still the case. For them, projectwork is frequently very enabling ? where previously their performance may have considerably exceeded the expected standard, with projects they can achieve as highly as they wish (Roberts, 2000). However, it is recognised increasingly that, as the number of students in higher education grows and as the range of abilities broadens, project supervisors must be more proactive in helping students to find the motivation to perform to the best of their ability.
Although individuals are different, students' motivation is often related to feeling that what they are doing is valued by others and feeling a sense of partnership with the person, or people, for whom the work is being done. So, although extrinsic motivators (such as awarding a prize for the best project and other types of rewards [see: 2.8 Motivation] may have an impact, they are likely to focus students' efforts on earning the rewards rather than on learning and achievement. Rather, the best work is likely to result from students being able to motivate themselves intrinsically. That is, each individual should find personal satisfaction in achieving whatever it is they set out to do.
Motivation may be addressed at several points in the cycle of learning. Keller (Keller, 1983) identifies four particular points. Students' motivation can be affected by their Interest in the work, their perception of its Relevance, their Expectation that they will succeed and their Satisfaction in their achievement.
It is important to distinguish un-motivation, which may be associated with remarks such as "What's the point of doing a project?" (Interest and Relevance) from de-motivation, which may result from difficulties experienced while undertaking the current project, or may be the residual effect of prior experience of project work (Expectation and Satisfaction).
Un-motivation may be associated with the degree programme as a whole rather than just the project component and this can be difficult to overcome. However, projects can represent an opportunity for individuals to exercise more control over their work, particularly in terms of the scheduling and location of work and sometimes even in terms of choice of subject matter and methods to be used as well. Projects can, therefore, be a real opportunity to help individuals get motivated.
Demotivation is a likely, perhaps inevitable, consequence of failure to match the requirements of the project to the abilities and skills of the student: if the project is either too hard or too easy motivation will be lost quickly. Similarly, it is important that students understand at an early stage in the project the nature and range of the demands that they will face. Many students will become demotivated if the demands of the project turn out to be at odds with their expectations.
In attempting to create an environment which helps to stimulate intrinsic motivation a key issue is that giving students more control over their work means that staff have less control. For example, involving students in the choice of project topic [see 2.1allocation of topics to students and 4.2 I'd like to do that] may help their motivation but it may also lead to staff working outside their areas of expertise. This may have implications for both the quality of supervision and the willingness of staff to take on supervisory responsibilities.
Similarly, it may be construed as motivating to allow students to determine the schedule for handing-in interim deliverables [see also 2.9(iii) Basis of assessment: deliverables]. This would allow students to take ownership by deciding when to work on the different aspects of the project requirements?but it necessarily means that staff work around the schedules devised by individual students. This will make it difficult for staff to plan their own work schedule and may bring project supervision into conflict with other aspects of staff workloads.
Clearly, it is necessary to balance staff and student control but achieving the optimal balance is problematic.
Un-motivated students are likely to have made themselves known in other parts of the course but de-motivation can be related to some aspect of the task in hand. Students become de-motivated for different reasons, and often the reasons relate to the individual's perception, rather than the reality, of how the project is going. Measures to cope with de-motivation must address the cause and this means that supervisors must be adept in identifying the real reasons for de-motivation (these may not be the most obvious or even those given by the student) and then tailoring strategy and tactics to the needs of the individual.
Indeed, used indiscriminately, measures to improve motivation may do more harm than good. For every student motivated by competition , for example, there may be one (or more ) students who are turned-off completely (Lepper, 1988). Publishing student work [see 7.7 Cherish it] may spur some students to ensure that it is of high quality, but for others this is an unnecessary extra pressure. There will always be some students who just do not respond to the invitation to negotiate aspects of their project.
Helping students to motivate themselves is very difficult because there is no panacea; one size does not fit all, and matching ideas and approaches to individual students is a key skill for teaching staff generally and for project supervisors in particular. Further, in attempting to stimulate intrinsic motivation teaching staff can do no more than serve as a catalyst: individual students eventually must take responsibility for their own motivation. Each of the bundles in this section, therefore, comes with a "health warning": it will not work for everyone.
Keller, J. M. (1983) In Instructional-Design Theories and Models (Ed, Reigeluth, C. M.) Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey.
Lepper, M. R. (1988) Cognition and Instruction, 5, 289-309.
Roberts, E. (2000) In 31st SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education ACM, Austin, Texas, pp. 295-299.