Fostering student motivation is a difficult but necessary aspect of teaching that instructors must consider. Many may have led classes where students are engaged, motivated, and excited to learn, but have also led classes where students are distracted, disinterested, and reluctant to engage—and, probably, have led classes that are a mix. What factors influence students’ motivation? How can instructors promote students’ engagement and motivation to learn? While there are nuances that change from student to student, there are also models of motivation that serve as tools for thinking through and enhancing motivation in our classrooms. This guide will look at three frameworks: the expectancy-value-cost model of motivation, the ARCS model of instructional design, and self-determination theory. These three models highlight some of the major factors that influence student motivation, often drawing from and demonstrating overlap among their frameworks. The aim of this guide is to explore some of the literature on motivation and offer practical solutions for understanding and enhancing student motivation.

In Episode 60, Cindy interviews Mary Chappell, a Department of Education Special Education Curriculum Specialist. With 25 years of education experience teaching elementary and special education, she is now supporting special education teachers, especially related to literacy. She found herself needing to motivate teachers to utilize a mandated program, and wanting to support them in doing so. Therefore, she turned to the literature.

The six strategies for effective learning are, indeed, effective, but only to the degree that students actually use them. And in order to change behavior, we have to consider motivation. Now, motivation is an entire area of psychology and not one that we pretend to be experts in. There are many different motivational theories, but today we’re going to zoom in on just one: self-efficacy, which comes out of social learning theory. We can thank Albert Bandura for most of our theoretical understanding of self-efficacy, which is our belief in our ability to successfully accomplish any given task (1). So, we can have high self-efficacy for our ability to use retrieval practice and low self-efficacy for our ability to use spacing. We can also have high self-efficacy in, say, history, and low self-efficacy in math.

There are a lot of factors that can influence self-efficacy and Bandura placed them into four distinct categories.