Engaging students

As part of her Master's degree, Marlène Douibi conducted an interesting teaching experiment. Suffering from the fact that some of her students showed no interest in her economics course, she wondered how she could engage them despite the obvious context of academic constraint.

Far from going on a crusade against this reality, she instead drew on this fact: the student's current status is made up of constraints: his time, his attention, his movements, his communications and even his possessions are controlled and put at the service of an objective to which he has not fully subscribed. So how do we motivate them?

An experiment

His experiment consisted in asking him to perform the same task, but under three different levels of constraint. (The rest of this text is taken directly from his dissertation).

"The first method applied took the form of constrained learning, in that the text, the object of learning, was presented as having to be learned imperatively. To reinforce this constraint, the children were informed beforehand that learning the text would be followed by a test designed to evaluate the task performed. What's more, the results of this test were to have a major impact on their progression to the next grade.

The second method was closer to learning without constraints. While students were also given a knowledge test after learning the text, the result of this assessment was not expected to have any impact on their further schooling.

In the third method, described as "non-directed", in addition to learning the text, students were given the additional task of answering questions about how interesting or difficult the text was to them.

Findings

The lower the degree of constraint, the greater the interest in the task. What's more, only the third method was conducive to long-term learning, thanks to the degree of autonomy granted to students.

The use of constraint as part of a learning process is therefore not always reconcilable with the quest for student motivation.

The limits and good uses of extrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation (motivation external to the subject) falls into three categories:

• Identified regulation, which corresponds to the highest degree of self-determined motivation. The individual invests in an activity not only under threat or with the prospect of direct reward, but because he or she has become aware of its importance to him or her. This awareness leads them to freely take an interest in their practice. At school level, the regulation identified corresponds to the student's gradual awareness of the importance of school work for his future. The student freely chooses to get involved in his work in order to achieve his career goals.
  
• Introjected regulation, in which the individual simply becomes aware of the impact of constraints on his choices, i.e. he begins to internalize constraints that were previously external to him.
  
• External regulation, which represents the situation of an individual who only engages in a given activity for fear of possible punishment, or in the hope of some form of reward. This is what happens in class, for example, when students only agree to get involved in their work "in exchange" for a grade. Here, external constraint has a negative effect on student autonomy, and therefore on motivation.

If pressure can be a motivating factor, it must be internalized by the student to achieve it.

Intrinsic motivation: a question of feeling competent

According to CHARLOT (1997), "there can be no learning without a desire to learn". Without this desire, students will find it more difficult to confront the task and the effort involved. Here, two conditions appear sine qua non for the birth of this desire. Firstly, the work must be of interest to the learner; it must make sense. Secondly, the learner must feel confident, i.e. work in a relatively serene atmosphere.

Intrinsic motivation is that which focuses the learner on the activity itself, for its own sake. As a result, curiosity and diligence are aroused by interest in the activity, while the risks of distraction and giving up in the face of difficulty are reduced.

No interest in a given discipline or activity can be aroused if the student feels incompetent. So it's the student's sense of competence that's important, not actual skill. As such, encouragement is essential to the stability of effort, and it is in this perspective of behavioral persistence that feedback is essential. So, while a certain amount of external pressure may be necessary to get people to work, it may not be enough to maintain them over time.

The key here is to establish a serene environment, notably by setting up rituals and a climate of cooperation, as well as the right to make mistakes, so that the desire to try out the task is aroused without apprehension.

Conclusion

At first glance, the results of the experiment seem to indicate that the introduction of a motivating activity has been successful:

• Avoidance strategies designed to disrupt the flow of the lesson (unnecessary or unauthorized movement around the room, failure to listen to instructions, speaking out of turn, etc.) are seemingly absent.
  
• The majority of students took the individual documentary analyses seriously, which testifies to their commitment to this first learning task.
  
• The questionnaires distributed at the end of the sequence testify to a definite interest not only in the subject matter, but also in the method of activity applied.

Involving students in their learning is a question of the attractiveness of the proposed activities, whatever the levers used. These levers are numerous (perhaps even too numerous to be activated simultaneously), and provide us with a considerable range of tools designed to motivate learners".

Illustration: Gianluca Foto - ShutterStock

Reference

Engaging students in their learning - Marlène DOUIBI - Master Métiers de l'enseignement, de l'éducation et de la formation
http://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01226767/document