Motivation: The Least Understood … Most Powerful Tool in Education

Motivation: The Least Understood … Most Powerful Tool in Education

At the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, Dr. Robert Rueda
(http://www.rcf.usc.edu/) is championing a theory: motivation is not innate, it can be learned and if so, it may very well be one of the most effective tools we have for helping English learners achieve literacy. I spoke with Dr. Rueda about his work examining motivational and sociocultural aspects of reading comprehension, especially as it relates to English-language learners and students living in at-risk conditions. We invite you to join this dialogue by asking questions or sharing your own experiences.

GA:
You are doing seminal work in the field of literacy and the impact of motivation on achieving literacy in diverse learners. Can you give us a broad overview?

RR:
Our educational system places a great deal of focus on cognition, the child’s intellectual understanding and comprehension of material presented in the classroom. Our research has shown that while cognition is an important element of literacy learning, motivation has an extremely significant role to play in literacy success; and yet it is widely overlooked and rarely understood.

GA:
Define “motivation” as you think of it in this context.

RR:
Most people, and many educators, believe that motivation is an innate and invariant characteristic; meaning, that you either have it or you don’t and if you do not, well, that’s just who you are and you’re unlikely to change. Research in the field, including our own, has disproven this theory and raised a more contemporary view of motivation which says that motivation is actually a set of beliefs shaped by your life experiences and the social contexts in which you function. These beliefs reflect your observations about the world in which you live, your sense of efficacy (ability to succeed at a given task), your perceptions about the causes of success and failure, and value you place on certain activities, and your interests and goals. Research has also shown that motivation is dynamic. So, a child who was previously unmotivated does have the capacity to change on a large scale.

GA:
How do you influence a child who is unmotivated to read become more motivated to do so?

RR:
There are three key factors that create a sense of motivation in ELL and at-risk students. First, the child must have an interest in, or place value on, a certain subject. Students work harder when what they are learning is important and familiar to them. Students must also believe that they are capable of doing well; we call this self-efficacy. We also see that students work harder when they believe their effort will pay off and when they are able to attribute their success or failure to the quality or amount of effort they expended on a particular task. Finally, we know that students are more motivated when their goal is to achieve understanding (we refer to this as mastery) rather than compete for a grade.

In the case of a child who seems unmotivated to learn, the key to helping him or her is first to discover why. Are they being asked to read or learn with materials to which they cannot relate and therefore, have no interest? For example, a child living in urban poverty may not be able to relate to stories that take place in rural settings. Do they believe the reason they are failing is simply because they are “dumb” instead of being helped to realize an inherent problem with their study habits or the amount of effort they applied to the task?

GA:
How can classroom teachers create environments that foster motivation?
RR:
Influencing motivation begins by understanding students and the sociocultural environments in which they live; good teachers know about their students’ lives outside of school. This forms the basis upon which teachers can offer students materials that are relevant and relatable to their own experiences and help them engage in the reading process. Additionally, teachers have a powerful influence over the degree to which the student feels he or she can be successful by delivering feedback that is fair and accurate, and that focuses on the work or the task instead of a perceived deficit in the child. For example, if a child fails a task the teacher should reinforce the child’s ability to improve, but relate the failure to the fact that the child needs to study differently, or study more and to suggest a new strategy for learning.

GA:
What about curriculum? For many teachers there is little room to manipulate curriculum and not enough development to sustain major changes to curriculum or introductions in new teaching methods.
RR:
There is an inverse relationship in public schools between a lack of motivation and an increase in control and standardization. The poorer a child performs the more rote and standardized the curriculum becomes. The obvious problem with this is that it further reduces a child’s interest and motivation to learn. Yet, even teachers who are teaching amid this type of situation can have influence. For example, in one classroom the teacher was working with a thematic unit on food sources and how various foods have been used throughout history. Many of the children in the class were from farming villages in Mexico and understood the value of corn because it was so central to their culture and their individual experiences. They could easily dialogue about this and immediately connect with the idea, therefore, the lesson had both interest and meaning and they believed they could be successful because they began with a basis for understanding. Ironically, teachers working amid highly controlled curriculums often suffer the same motivational challenges as their students.

GA:
What role do parents play in helping to motivate their children to become literate?

RR:
As was pointed out in a previous blog, parents exert great influence over the value their children place on literacy. At-risk children typically lack conventional reading materials in their homes and rarely see their parents reading, simply because the parents themselves may be illiterate. Even illiterate parents can make use of their cultural knowledge and traditions by telling stories or discussing pictures they see in the news or by using picture books to engage in reading activities. Our research also shows that the degree to which parents insist on hard work in school and value the effort their children put into their schoolwork is critical to motivation. Further, children of parents who set challenging expectations and believe their children can meet them do better than children whose parents have low expectations. Simply showing an interest in what your child is interested in helps foster learning.

GA:
What literature or resources exist for teachers who want to learn more about how to better motivate and engage their students in literacy?

RR:
Dr. Rueda, can you provide a perspective here?
A good web-based quick overview of motivation and reading can be found on:
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/handbook/guthrie/index.html

An additional resource is the CORI (Concept Oriented Reading Instruction), a program developed at the University of Maryland by Dr. John Guthrie and his colleagues. A good description of this program, along with classroom materials, research articles, videotape clips, etc, can be found at:
http://www.cori.umd.edu/

Unfortunately, little work has been done to date specifically with students who are in the process of acquiring English, but increasing attention is being paid to this topic.


Dr. Robert Rueda is a professor in the area of Psychology in Education at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. He completed his doctoral work at the University of California at Los Angeles in Educational Psychology and Special Education, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. His research has focused on the sociocultural basis of motivation and instruction, with a focus reading and literacy in English learners, students in at-risk conditions, and students with mild learning handicaps.


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Para Los Niños