Can Teachers Actually Promote Student Engagement?
Engagement is something that the students do, and as such, it's easy to say that they either come willing and ready to invest in the work or they don't. But in truth, teachers can do much to promote positive attitudes toward learning and the level of effort and depth of processing achieved. Indeed, for teachers, this is part and parcel of the job. Instructors who seek to increase opportunities for student engagement help everyone more successfully achieve the course's learning objectives. Decades of research in higher education document the relationship between student engagement and learning outcomes, and these results have been collated and synthesized in meta-studies focused on the key factors of engagement.
Meta-Research on Motivation Interventions
Several researchers have affirmed the relationship between motivation and learning. In addition, they have shown that an instructor's intentional efforts toward promoting motivation can be effective. In a 2016 meta-analysis, for example, the authors reviewed research on intervention studies that were grounded in motivation theory, such as achievement emotions, achievement goals, attribution, expectancy-value, goal setting, implicit theories of intelligence (mindsets), interest, need for achievement, possible selves, self-affirmation, self-confrontation, self-determination, self-efficacy, social belongingness, and transformative experience. They examined studies from all educational levels, including 57 studies at the college/university/postsecondary level. They found that interventions were generally effective at improving motivation and increasing learning outcomes (Lazowski & Hulleman, 2016). Their research provides faculty with documentation that efforts toward enhancing motivation can improve engagement and learning outcomes.
Meta-Research on Active Learning Strategies
We have noted that active learning is something akin to intellectual effort or deep processing, and that active learning techniques are the particular tasks teachers use to promote active learning among students. Hundreds of studies have documented the benefits of active learning techniques or strategies on student learning outcomes, and several authors have written excellent research reviews of this work (see, e.g., Hake, 1998; Michael, 2006; Prince, 2004). Moreover, a widely publicized article by Freeman et al. (2014) compared student outcomes in lectures alone versus lectures combined with active learning strategies in undergraduate STEM courses through a meta-analysis of 225 studies. The researchers found that when instructors used active learning strategies in addition to their lectures, student exam scores increased significantly and student failure rates decreased significantly when compared to instructors who used lecture methods alone. This review also suggests that teachers can play a meaningful role in promoting student engagement and learning outcomes by incorporating active learning techniques.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have defined engagement as a mental state representing the intersection of motivation (the feeling aspect of engagement) and active learning (the thinking aspect of engagement). We have suggested that teachers can do much to promote motivation and active learning, and that when they do so, they can improve student engagement and ultimately student learning outcomes.
Understanding basic principles drawn from research and theory on motivation and active learning can offer insights into how to promote student engagement. Let us therefore explore the first element in our model of student engagement, student motivation, in greater depth.
Chapter 2 Engagement and Motivation
WE HAVE POSITED that student engagement is a product of motivation and active learning; in this section, our focus is on the motivation factor of the model. What is motivation and how does motivation work in the college classroom as an essential factor of student engagement? While these are important questions that many college teachers grapple with, unfortunately there's not an easy answer. There are, however, several different theories about what motivates individuals and how motivation happens. Understanding these theories broadly can help to inform our understanding of how to motivate students and ultimately engage them in their learning. We now turn our attention to unpacking the concept of motivation.
What Is Motivation?
In Chapter 1, we described motivation as a theoretical construct to explain the reason(s) we engage in a particular behavior. We suggested that motivation is the feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes someone want to do something. At a fundamental level, then, motivation is the inclination to act in a way that satisfies certain conditions, such as wishes, desires, or goals. Motivation means attempting to optimize well-being, maximize pleasure, and minimize pain. While motivations can be biologically based factors that are often called drives, including constructs like hunger and thirst that are rooted in biological purposes, they can also be driven by social and psychological mechanisms.
Motivation that is driven by social and psychological factors comes in two types: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation arises from internal factors such as personal satisfaction, interest, or enjoyment. For students, if they are in college because they want to learn and want to become more educated, they are intrinsically motivated. Intrinsically motivated students will be motivated by autonomy, purpose, and excellence. Motivation can also be extrinsic, which means it arises from external factors. Extrinsically motivated students might do their work because they want good grades or they want high-paying jobs upon graduation, or perhaps they are just trying to satisfy their parents, not just because they want to learn.
While some scholars have found that implementing strategies that promote extrinsic motivation could decrease intrinsic motivation (see, e.g., Deci, 1971; Kohn, 1993/1999), these findings have been challenged (see, e.g., Cameron, 2001); thus we have yet to fully determine the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. What we can say is that most students seem motivated by a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, and that mix can change over time. We can also say that while many of us might prefer students who were completely intrinsically motivated, we would also do well to recognize the reality of extrinsic motivation in our students' lives and to understand that this type of motivation can have a place in the college classroom.
Several theories of motivation exist, and these can aid our understanding of student motivation. Early theories of motivation suggested that rational thought and reason were the primary factors in human motivation. However, many now believe that motivation may not be entirely rational and instead may be rooted in basic instincts, needs, and wants. Two primary categories of motivation theory are particularly important to our current work: content theories and process theories.
What Motivates Students?
Some of the earliest theories of motivation focus on the question of what motivates human behavior; these are called “content theories.” Theories in this area suggest that motivation is an attempt to fill needs. Motivation content theorists focus on identifying what our basic needs are and how we prioritize them. Common content theories of motivation are Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Alderfer's ERG (existence, relatedness, and growth) theory, and Herzberg's two-factor theory. In Table 2.1, we provide a summary of what the authors see as main needs/motivators of human behavior.
Content theories often intimate that lower-level needs must be met prior to achievement of higher-level needs. Maslow, for example, indicates that basic physiological