University Times

The age-old question on how to motivate students this month got a cognitive-psychology treatment from a Pitt research scientist.

“Motivation is one word, but in fact is a really big thing with many pieces,” said Christian Schunn, associate professor of psychology and research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center. “A student’s performance can suffer from just one broken piece. The solution depends on what is broken, and the diagnosis usually requires empirical work” on the part of the instructor, he said in a lecture titled “It’s Half Time and You’re Behind: Motivating Students in and out of the Classroom.”

The Oct. 10 lecture, sponsored by the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education, was followed by a question-and-answer session with Pitt head basketball coaches Agnus Berenato and Jamie Dixon (see related story this issue).

Traditional thinking on how to motivate individuals in a broad sense derived initially from an economics concept on why people make the choices they do, said Schunn, who drew on psychological theory as well as performance-under-pressure motivation.

“That idea begins with the assumption that each person, each buyer or seller, as a rational thinker tries to optimize” what he or she gets in return, he explained. “This idea was popular in psychology 100 years ago but fell out of favor. Educational psychologists began believing that it’s bogus that people are that rational or always make rational choices. But over the last 20 years in the study of thinking and the study of motivation, it turns out that actually the original insights were right, but they need tweaking.”

Rather, Schunn said, in making choices people exhibit a special form of rationality: They will make sensible choices, given what they know about how achieving success will benefit them versus the amount of effort they believe is required to achieve that success.

That analysis, he said, can be codified into a simple formula: Choice equals success times value minus cost. In other words, the choices a person makes are coming from how successful they will be if they make that choice, multiplied by the value to them of what they’re trying to achieve, while subtracting the cost, that is, the amount of effort it takes to achieve that success.

Schunn then applied that general formula to the context of education.

What is choice?

“What does choice mean in the context of learning? In large lecture classes you’re likely to have half the class choose not to come. That’s one choice. Second, there is choosing to listen if you do come. You chose to be here. But that doesn’t mean you’re actively taking in knowledge. The Internet, cell phones and other things provide distractions that make it easy to zone out,” Schunn said.

“Then there’s choosing to think about what was said afterward. Do I really buy it? What does it mean? If I’m expected to remember it afterwards, am I choosing to be an active participant in the learning — these are all pieces of motivation. Am I choosing to practice it? Or will I understand it only briefly? It takes extra work to remember it and that requires motivation. Studying leads to success, so homework, practice problems are important.”

Equally important is the learning environment, and that’s controlled by the instructor, Schunn pointed out.

“I would argue that the expectation of success [in the classroom] should be effort-dependent rather than IQ-dependent or talent-dependent,” he maintained.

There are two main barriers to that expectation, Schunn said. The first is that each class will have students who think they can just show up to class once in a while and wing it. “That’s the way they got by in high school, so why put in the effort? That’s a rational choice from their perspective, given what they know.”

The other extreme is those students who believe that no matter what they do they’ll fail, so there’s no point in trying — also a rational choice based on their beliefs.

“Either way, this ‘talent view,’ or IQ view, is very destructive, both for those who think they have it and aren’t trying and those who think they don’t have it and aren’t trying,” Schunn said. “If they have a genetic view of intelligence, they believe it can’t change, versus an incremental view of intelligence where you can always change how intelligent you are if you put in the effort. Intelligence is modifiable.”

Students express these kinds of beliefs all the time, and disabusing them of these notions is not easy, but he said it can be done.

A student might say: “‘I’m just not a writer. It’s not my thing. It’s a genetic variable.” Schunn said: “Attacking that view is very important. You can change that view to say: Effort, not talent, is required for success in this course. But if that’s not done early in the semester, it may become too late.”

Most Pitt students were quite successful in high school, Schunn noted. “But did they apply effort? They’d cram the night before, they’d breeze through, they’d wing it — that’s been good enough. But it isn’t good enough here.” If they don’t get that feedback early on, you may lose them, he said.

What kind of models should the instructor use to stimulate interest in the discipline?

Virtually all academic disciplines have a history that includes famous people. However, by pointing to a discipline’s geniuses, students become burdened with the stereotype that only geniuses can succeed, he pointed out.

“When we hold up models of genius, we point to them as people with innate talent. That plays into the stereotype of the people who have talent and the people who don’t,” Schunn said. “Whereas if you provide information about how these people struggled along the way to success, all the missteps, it shows the kind of effort and problem-solving needed to get there.”

How does an instructor get across to the students what is required to succeed in the course?

“At the beginning of the course, you can survey your students to find out what their expectations are, to find out what people think they can get away with and still succeed, as well as to identify those who believe that no matter how they try they’re going to fail,” Schunn said.

What is the concept of value in the educational context?

“For all of you who teach, your discipline to you is super hot. You love the thing you teach,” Schunn said. Students rarely share that enthusiasm, at least at first.

“Students need a reason to care to be motivated. They don’t need all the reasons, but they do need at least one. You should always be playing up reasons to care,” he said.

One approach, called mastery motivation, is to emphasize intrinsic value: This subject is interesting in and of itself. Teachers should stress: “It is important to understand this content, not to get an A, but for its intrinsic value. Intrinsic interest leads to learning through increases in interest,” Schunn said.

“And your discipline has many elements in it. There are lots of things that are of broad appeal, and then there are the things with narrow appeal. There are lots of surveys you can do to measure student interest” at the outset, he said.

There also are methods to increase that level of interest.

But there is a distinction between gimmicks and real hooks, Schunn pointed out. “You can put on a clown suit when you teach, and some people enjoy that kind of thing. But it is counterproductive because essentially it reinforces the view that this subject isn’t interesting on its own. It becomes palatable only when we add a whole lot of sugar on it,” he maintained.

A different view is to look for things in the discipline itself that have a wow factor.

“An example of a real hook is from my own teaching in psychology. There is a very interesting study in which a group watches a short video and they’re asked to count how many times a basketball is passed back and forth,” Schunn said.

In the middle of the video a person in a gorilla suit walks in, waves his arms and then walks out.

“At the end you ask how many times the basketball was passed, and you get answers from the viewers. Then you ask ‘Did anybody notice anything else? Did anybody notice the gorilla? No? Well, let’s play it again.’

“They see the gorilla and you hear, ‘Wow! Psychology is cool!’ That’s a very different approach than if I taught wearing a gorilla suit,” Schunn said.

Another approach to build students’ interest is to focus on the fundamental need in humans to know things that affect them directly, he said.

“The push is to have the students feel that what they’re working on has relatedness — that need for what you’re working on to somehow connect to who you are, what you think of yourself. That you also can assess by doing surveys. How do students think of themselves now and how do they see themselves in the future?” Schunn said.

Another method for raising interest is to make students feel competent. “Tell them: ‘I know it’s hard, but you can do it.’ You want to give them a certain amount of autonomy, so they’ll feel competent. Too much autonomy is bad, but you can give some sense of choice, just not an infinite choice. You can give hints: Tell them: ‘You can explore this in this way, or do you want to explore this in that way?’ It allows them to build on that relatedness,” he explained. “There are external reasons to care: There is the utility value, when they learn how useful learning X is for their after-college career or in their personal life,” Schunn said.

To tie all these recommendations together, he said, “A basic question for you as teachers is: Do you know why your students are taking your classes? Do you ask them? Why did they sign up? Some might be there only because it’s required for their major or minor, but many may have other motives. Are they merely interlopers that show up? It makes a difference in how you can motivate them,” he said.

“You should tell your students how the skills they learn are relevant to their personal and social goals, which will vary. It’s also important to note that not all motivation derives from making money or gaining fame — again, returning to intrinsic value. There are some social benefits to changing the world for the better. Actually, social change, social action historically comes from a higher percentage of people who are not motivated by money or fame,” Schunn said.

What is the cost in the learning context?

“Often we create environments where various things evolve into a whole. You can think of things to do at each step. The trick here is to lower the incremental costs of learning, to set in front of them some simple steps,” Schunn said.

“If you’re asking someone: ‘Are you committed to spending 1,000 hours on this major project — yes or no?’ They’ll ask themselves: ‘Why am I doing this?’ Whereas if you’re putting in front of them a task that takes an hour, that serves the purpose of lessening the conflict between difficulty and amount of effort.”

When students come into a course thinking it will be very difficult and will require untold hours of effort, an instructor can counter that sense of being overwhelmed, Schunn said. “You can say, ‘Well, in general it is difficult, but how hard is it for you to do X?’ So what you’re really doing is lowering the perceived incremental costs of learning.”

Writing assignments are a good example, he said. “It’s easier to motivate students when the small tasks build to larger ones, like the process of writing goes from jotting down notes, to informal writing, to drafts to final versions,” Schunn said.

“It’s also best to offer hints to eliminate blind searches, which can waste a lot of time off the track. We want to challenge students, but sometimes we give them assignments where they pursue blind alleys. They’re approaching it from completely wrong directions. They come to feel that this class requires crazy amounts of work and it’s not worth it,” he said.

Will this be on the test?

“An age-old student question: How do I spend the time learning what I need to learn for the test?” Schunn said. “Motivation also plays itself out in counterproductive ways. A focus on fear of failure can create failure. Some students will say, ‘I just want to not fail; that’s my goal,’ and that becomes a performance avoidance goal,” he said.

Research shows that such performance avoidance affects the complex reasoning skills, Schunn said. “Worrying reduces our working memory. Rather than having the ‘head space’ to see it through, your head space is filled with anxiety. It happens at all levels of performance.”

Schunn recommended that the instructor at the beginning of a test tell the students to take a couple minutes and write out their worries. Tell them, “If you’re stressed, say that,’” Schunn said. “This can have very large benefits, especially for the people with a stereotype stigma of themselves as likely to fail or those with the only goal of not failing.”

—Peter Hart