Motivation Myth Busters Series

Motivation Differs by Subject/Topic/Domain

Suggestions/advice

Try to determine what students are interested in and relate content to that interest. For example, suggest books on sports figures to a student who is interested in sports. Have children choose a topic to explore for a research project. For topics that are not within the student’s area of interest, describe the usefulness of the material for things in which they are interested. For example, if a child is not interested in history but loves dinosaurs, the child can be motivated by learning about how history can provide information about how dinosaurs came into being.

Motivation is Affected by the Context and the Motivating Styles of Others

We have all had the experience of being interested in something and then being disappointed when you pursued the interest further. For example, you want to take tennis lessons but the instructor is so critical that the fun you thought you’d have is not attained. Conversely, a topic that didn’t seem interesting was brought alive by an enthusiastic teacher!

These apparent contradictions occur because how others interact with us makes a huge difference in our motivation level. If we want students to be motivated, it is important that we create environments in which motivation flourishes.

Studies ² show that people will be most motivated when they feel:

1) To help students feel like they aren’t being pushed or pressured ³:

• Provide choices. Choices can be offered with regard to what activities to pursue or even when and how to complete tasks. For example, though a biography needs to be read, children can choose from several possible biographies. They might also get to decide when they read (before or after dinner).
• Allow students input into schedules. Children are more likely to want to follow the schedule or pursue a task when they have an active role in creating the schedule. For example, sit down together and have everyone contribute their ideas about the best time for studying, chores, relaxing etc.
• Support children’s initiations. When you see the child initiate an action (even if not exactly the one you had in mind!), encourage it. For example, if you see your child pick up a magazine, ask about what they are reading, find out if they want more magazines, etc.
• Problem solve together. When things aren’t going well, suggest that you put your heads together to figure out what you could do differently.

2) To help students feel competent ⁴:

• Be clear about what is expected. For example, if reading is expected, specify number of pages, what they need to focus on, and how they will show evidence of learning.
• Make sure tasks are not too difficult. People are motivated most for tasks that are just a little above their current competence level. If tasks are too hard or too easy, people’s motivation will decrease.
• Break down tasks so they seem doable. For example, reading an entire novel may be too big a task. Try tackling the first chapter and discussing before moving on.

3) To help students feel connected ⁵:

• Be understanding. Express empathy about asking children to do something they may not want to do. Feeling understood will help them to want to follow directions.
• Have fun. Add fun and positive interactions to every day.
• Make connection part of the daily routine. For example, set aside a regular time to share what has been learned. Seeing children as not motivated can create a negative mindset that makes them more likely to disengage. Seeing all children as motivated for some things and affected by the way we interact with them will help us help them to channel their motivation in productive ways and decrease stress and conflict. All students are motivated—our job is to capitalize on and help channel that motivation!

Seeing children as not motivated can create a negative mindset that makes them more likely to disengage. Seeing all children as motivated for some things and affected by the way we interact with them will help us help them to channel their motivation in productive ways and decrease stress and conflict. All students are motivated—our job is to capitalize on and help channel that motivation.

Woman with coffee cup smiling with student One popular method for motivating children is to give them rewards, such as stickers, snacks, or toys for desired behaviors. And this can be an effective method, especially for activities that may not be intrinsically interesting such as making the bed or cleaning a room. However, for school-related activities other types of motivation may be more effective. For these activities, rewards can actually be damaging to motivation in the long run.

Rewards can increase motivation to act to obtain the reward, but they can actually undermine intrinsic motivation (being motivated because the activity is fun or interesting) and the perceived value of the behavior. It is important to think about "what kind of motivation" is being encouraged. There are different "kinds" of motivation.

Rewards

Rewards are commonly used to elicit behaviors. And again, these can be effective, especially for tasks that don’t have much value or interest to a child, such as practicing typing on the keyboard. In addition, when children are not motivated at all, extrinsic rewards can be a good option to promote initial engagement in a task. However, rewards can actually undermine intrinsic motivation. That is, when children are interested in an activity, rewards can negatively influence that interest. For example, if a child enjoys reading and you create a reward system where they get a prize every time they read a book, the child may stop reading because they enjoy it, and start reading only to get the prize afterwards. The prize essentially removed their enjoyment for reading. And if you eventually take away the prize, the child may stop reading, because they no longer get a prize afterwards. Thus, while rewards may be effective for children who lack motivation, relying on rewards, especially for children who are already motivated, could diminish intrinsic motivation ¹.

Different kinds of motivation

Many people believe that you’re either motivated or not. However, scientific research suggests that motivation is much more complicated and that there are actually different kinds of motivation ². To begin, motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. On the one hand, intrinsic motivation occurs when someone participates in an activity because they get joy out of the activity in itself. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation occurs when people engage in an activity for some other reason, such as to get some kind of external reward like a sticker or candy. However extrinsic motivation can be broken down even further. Extrinsic motivation can include completing tasks for pride or to avoid guilt. That is, a child may try hard on an activity because they respect their teacher and thus don’t want to slack off because they will feel guilty for not putting in the work. Extrinsic motivation can also take the shape of putting lots of effort into an activity because learning the content will be useful for their future. For example, a child may try hard to learn about counting so they can play a better game of Monopoly with the family! Parents can help their children move toward the latter kind of motivation by helping them recognize the value and importance of the activity. For example, explaining that science is cool because it can help predict the weather can help a child see that science is interesting and personally meaningful. Therefore, when parents are attempting to motivate their kids to engage in academic activities, they may consider looking beyond external rewards and focusing on other kinds of motivation. Below are some suggestions and advice for generating motivation in children to ensure that they are learning deeply.

For activities that are fun and interesting, emphasize this rather than rewarding children for acting. Rewards can be useful for students with very low motivation or for menial tasks that have little inherent interest or don’t need to be continued long-term. However, to reduce reliance on rewards and to build a sense of importance for the activity you can 1) build relationships with children, 2) emphasize the usefulness of the activity or topic, 3) promote recognition of the personal relevance of the activity or topic, and 4) make activities fun and interesting.

1) Build relationships with children:

It’s important to build rapport with children, especially related to schooling. Research shows that when parents engage in activities with their children and convey that they find the activities important, their children are more likely to find them important as well ³. Thus, when engaging in schooling at home, parents can read a book or complete a science project with their children and talk about how much fun or interesting it was, which could increase student motivation. When parents have a positive relationship with their children, the children will be motivated to complete the work and will have pride in it. So, dig in with children and relearn all that content from grade school.

2) Emphasize the usefulness of the activity or topic:

To increase motivation, parents can explicitly convey the usefulness of material. Parents can tell their children how the material can help them to do something that they like. Math can help children build a tree house, science can help children make slime, English can help children text their friends, and social studies can help children understand important current issues, such as racial inequities. After explicitly communicating the usefulness of the content, parents can have their children write about why they think the material is useful or valuable. Research has shown that when children write just a couple of sentences about why school content is valuable, it has a lasting effect on student motivation ⁴. Parents can have children use language arts knowledge to write a letter to a state representative about the Black Lives Matter movement to generate social change. Or children could use science to better understand climate change and engage in more sustainable behavior, such as recycling and turning off lights in the house.

3) Promote recognition of the personal relevance of the activity or topic:

When academic content is relevant to children’s everyday life, motivation for learning increases ⁵. Parents can try to create tasks and activities that relate to children’s interests. For example, write math problems that include their favorite cartoons, discuss the science of sports such as the speed and velocity of a baseball, or teach reading and writing through the lyrics of their favorite songs. When children notice that school concepts are relevant to their favorite things, their motivation to learn about it will increase.

4) Make activities fun and interesting:

Finally, when learning is fun, children are more likely to be intrinsically motivated ⁶. Parents can make learning fun by playing games to learn the material. Download apps such as Kahoot to play quiz games related to the content. Teach kids math by playing card games such as Uno, war, or Skip-Bo. Having fun together can facilitate motivation!

Using rewards can be a useful way to get an unmotivated child to engage in a task. But you have to be careful to not rely on rewards or you risk undermining intrinsic motivation or having the child just do the activity because of the reward, which will not sustain after rewards are discontinued. Use the techniques above to encourage a more sustained kind of motivation and generate interest and value for the content. Doing so will ensure that learners stay motivated and engage in the future. Motivation is the key to developing an environment that supports a child to be truly inspired to learn at home.

Young male student taking notes As mentioned previously, motivation is a complex topic. There are different aspects of motivation and people’s motivation differs by domain and context. Here we take on a myth exemplified in Aesop’s fable of the "The Fox and the Grapes." ¹ After striving very hard to reach some delicious grapes on a high vine and not succeeding, the fox departed, concluding that the grapes were probably sour anyway.

Highly motivated students struggle all of the time for many reasons. Even if students are highly motivated, they need skills and strategies to be successful.

Motivation is One Contributor to Success

Motivation provides direction for behavior and propels us to act in a way that facilitates meeting goals. However, the benefits of motivation are dependent on several other factors. Consider the following scenario. Zane is taking a Geometry class. It’s Friday and the mid-term examinations are the following Monday. Zane is highly motivated to get an "A" in the mid-term. But has Zane been taking notes and studying all semester? Does Zane have the self-regulation to forego his usual weekend activities (e.g., sports, the movies) with his friends? The answers to these and other questions will also play a role in whether Zane achieves his goal, in spite of his high level of motivation.

Suggestions/advice

Children must be taught pre-requisite knowledge and skills to complete tasks, in addition to being motivated at high levels. These prerequisites may include self-regulatory skills such as goal-setting, organizing materials, and seeking help.

Motivation Interacts with Other Variables to Facilitate Success

As the fox in Aesop’s fable discovered, high motivation does not guarantee success. Many of us have worked very hard in pursuit of a goal and have been disappointed when we have not attained the goal that we were working towards. However, knowledge of how motivation works can lead us to a different conclusion than the one drawn by the fox. Studies show that motivation is more likely to result in goal attainment:

1) To ensure that children have the requisite skills and competencies ²:

• Teach them to self-assess. Children should be encouraged to review their previous performance and identify areas in which they did well and areas in which they did not perform as well. They should also think about the reasons they did not do as well in their weaker areas and identify the skills or competencies that need revisiting or developing.
• Have them develop plans to improve skills in the areas of weakness. Using the reasons that they identified for not doing well, children can develop a plan to improve their skills in that area. For example, if the issue was fluency with math facts, add reviewing math facts into the study plan. Alternatively, if the area was lack of vocabulary knowledge, work on increasing vocabulary.
• Encourage and facilitate consultation with knowledgeable others. After they have conducted a self-assessment and identified skills that can be developed further, have them double-check their conclusions with someone who is knowledgeable in the domain. This individual can be a teacher, coach, parent, sibling, or friend. They can have the other individual double-check their conclusions and provide feedback.

2) To help kids engage in personal best goal setting ³:

• Have them develop goals based on a review of previous work and the feedback received. Goals should be based on their own previous performance—that is, goals should be self-referenced. You want the children’s goals to reflect where they are and where they want to go, rather than other children’s performance and skills.
• Help children anticipate challenges to meeting their goals and plan strategies to compensate for those challenges. Children should be encouraged to develop a list of potential obstacles to meeting their goals and develop proactive plans for dealing with those obstacles. For example, they can enlist the assistance of friends and family members to help them stay focused (e.g., not asking them to play or socialize at the times they are working).

3) To help your children set challenging but realistic goals ⁴:

1. Goals should be growth-focused and sequential. As noted earlier, if tasks are too hard or too easy, people’s motivation will decrease. Thus, children need to set goals that are challenging in that they require work to accomplish but are realistic and attainable if they put in the work. Using current competence and the goal as beginning and end points, help children develop a hierarchy of sequential tasks or steps to the final goal.
2. Ensure that goal-setting also includes time to accomplish tasks. It is sometimes easy to set goals to accomplish, but children must also include time in the plan for accomplishing the goals. Thus, in setting goals, children need to identify (a) what the goal is, (b) when they will work on the goal, and (c), how they will assess whether they have met their goal. Parents and other knowledgeable supporters can review the plan and indicate how they will help meet the goals that have been set.

Our task as educators and parents includes facilitating adaptive motivational processes in children and adolescents and helping them develop the skills and competencies that set the stage for motivation being of maximal utility.

Young boy writing in notebook Praising ability can actually be demotivating. ¹ Telling students, they are smart, brilliant, or "a natural" when they perform well can lead to thinking their abilities are fixed or unchangeable. ² This is termed a fixed mindset and can result in decreased motivation. Students with a fixed mindset may avoid difficult or challenging tasks because they fear such tasks will reveal that they aren’t sufficiently smart. The logic goes: "If I succeed because I am smart, I must fail because I am not. So, what’s the use of trying?" ³ This is how praising ability can lead to a fixed mindset and be demotivating.

A. Growth mindsets and associated outcomes^{. 4-7} Students with growth mindsets have the tendency to view achievements in, for example, athletics, school subjects, or arts performance, as an inherent part of the learning process that can be overcome with more effort, practice, and a toolbox of strategies. Children with growth mindsets tend to:

• See high value in effort.
• Choose more challenging tasks over easy ones.
• Take advantage of opportunities to get help.
• Persist longer in the face of difficulty.
• See early challenges and failures as opportunity for growth.

B. Students may hold a fixed mindset in one domain but a growth mindset in a different domain. ⁸ For example, Natasha might believe she has little math ability and so she does not see high value in trying harder to get better. As a result, Natasha tends to give up easily in math. However, Natasha understands she is not particularly good at soccer, but feels with practice she can improve. As a result, Natasha commits herself to practicing at least ten minutes a day.

C. Mindsets can change. ⁹ Mindsets are malleable. Home, school, and extracurricular environments can foster or reinforce fixed or growth mindsets.

1. Praise effort. When your child, with pride, hands you a paper on which you know they struggled do well, praise the effort required. You could try, "Wow! I know how hard you must have worked. I am impressed with the time and focus you spent on that." When a child is struggling to understand a concept, reassure them that is an important part of learning and growth.

2. Compliment challenge. When your child tries something new, recognize that for your child, this choice carries risk of failure as all new ventures do. Let your child know how much you admire the choice and praise the process of taking on something new.

3. Reinterpret failures. Challenges and failures are inherent in the process of learning. When your child stumbles, help them see it as an opportunity to try a new strategy, or as feedback about what they can improve.

4. Praise resilience. When your child is struggling to grasp something new, recognize and celebrate their tenacity. Let your child know that resilience is a hallmark of long-term success. Encourage perseverance through the struggles. It is important to recognize resilience during the struggle and afterwards. After your child has grasped the new concept, whether it is minutes later, days later, or months later, take the time to reflect on the important role resilience played.

5. Associate effort with perseverance. Point out how great performers work hard to get good. Read biographies about some of your children’s favorite stars (e.g., LeBron James, Beyoncé Knowles, Alex Morgan). Associating effort and perseverance with successful outcomes helps debunk the myth that brilliance in any domain is effortless.

6. Encourage asking for help. Let your child know that asking for help is an opportunity for gaining new information that can be used to improve; that it does not signify failure or lack of intelligence.

There are times when students will succeed without putting forth much effort because the task is not sufficiently challenging for them. Praising a student’s effort for success when effort was not required (e.g., the task was easy) may reinforce the student’s fixed mindset and inadvertently signal it was the student’s ability that was responsible for the success rather than effort. ¹⁰ Another potential problem with praising effort when effort was not required is that the praise will seem insincere and may lead students to lack trust in your evaluation. ¹

1. Avoid the temptation to praise. It is okay to avoid praise. Letting success on an easy task go without praise may signal that you had confidence in your child all along.

2. Get your child’s perspective. When your child succeeds at an easy task, instead of providing praise, you might ask your child whether they enjoyed the task, what they liked about the task, or how the task could be solved differently. Providing the chance for your child to share their thoughts might be a way to communicate without conveying messages about ability.

A fixed mindset may hamper the path to expertise. Gaining expertise involves encountering and taking opportunities to learn new knowledge and skills. Many great performers and inventors of wonderful ideas overcame beliefs held by others that they would not be successful. The pursuit of excellence and challenging old ideas guarantees some setbacks. Children with a growth mindset are better prepared to persevere and to learn from early stumbling blocks than children with a more fixed mindset because they are likely to view setbacks as surmountable by increasing effort or trying new strategies.

Make praise motivating by cultivating a growth mindset. The world our children grow up in is filled with opportunities and challenges. Perhaps our most important role as parents and teachers is to provide them with tools and attitudes that will serve them well. As an added benefit, focusing children and youth on developing a growth mindset helps to remind us how such a mindset can enhance our own effectiveness and well-being as professionals, parents, and members of the community.