How to Motivate Students to Actually Do Homework and Reading
The following is the most recent installment of the Toward Better Teaching recommendation column. You can pose a query for a future column here.
Reader Question:
Dear Bonni, What concepts do you have got for pupil accountability? How can we get college students to do pre-class work with out giving a grade to every thing? —Looking for change
Dave, my husband, was within the driveway a couple of days in the past, about to head someplace with our two children. I had simply completed my elliptical exercise and he requested, “Are you glad you did it?” I used to be glad, nevertheless it didn’t begin that method. The strikes got here prior to the motivation.
For 429 days straight, I’ve exercised for not less than thirty minutes, a routine that will get bolstered by the sense of accomplishment and my general higher well being. I used to be certainly completely satisfied to have taken that subsequent step towards persevering with my dedication. But I don’t depend on a sense to get me transferring most days. Instead, I lean on the facility of habits to draw me into motion, even when the best way I’m feeling doesn’t essentially immediate me. Often, college students expertise the identical mindset round out of sophistication preparation and we wind up needing to assist them set up good habits past what they might naturally exhibit on their very own.
James Clear describes the 4 parts of our established patterns in “Atomic Habits: An Easy, Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones.” Cues are the triggers that we people affiliate with some kind of a reward. Cravings are the drives that encourage us to act. Responses are the behaviors or ideas we in flip produce, assuming that there isn’t an excessive amount of friction stopping them—and ample causes to produce them. Rewards are what we get after we take the supposed motion or assume the specified thought.
Building up a behavior just like the one I’ve accomplished for train entails each intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for most individuals. It really requires some unlearning, and some adjustments in strategy, to create an atmosphere that higher encourages college students to full assigned actions. Instructors first want to take into account how we use grades in our educating—and then discover what sorts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations exist and persist for our college students.
Much of our college students’ academic experiences have taught them to get hold of the rewards for a transactional gauge of their actions within the type of factors or grades. In Susan Blum’s “Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What to Do, Instead),” we uncover that when it comes to considerations about grade inflation:
“The trouble isn’t that too many students are getting As but that too many students have been led to believe the primary purpose of schooling is to get As,” she writes.
Part of the rationale why college students don’t full the pre-work for lessons is as a result of they’ve been conditioned to deal with extrinsic rewards of their training. All too usually, amassing as many factors as doable turns into the sport, completely designed to squeeze out any intrinsic motivations which may have in any other case surfaced alongside the best way.
So how do you get college students to full the duties that may assist them higher interact in a category session? Here are some approaches which have labored properly for me particular to the context you inquired about.
Two frequent considerations that I’ve come throughout are that:
- Grading takes up an excessive amount of time for instructors, and that
- Instructors want college students did the work earlier than class with no need to be awarded factors for his or her effort.
First of all, there are approaches that may assist scale back grading time whereas nonetheless giving helpful suggestions to college students. For occasion, instructors can strategically assign duties that may be auto-graded, or spot-checked. When vocabulary is a crucial facet of a category I’m educating, I’ll typically assign an auto-graded quiz that presents ten questions from a big financial institution of phrases and enable for the quiz to be repeated by college students till they earn their desired rating. In different assignments, college students are instructed to document a screencast of themselves taking part in an identical recreation that reinforces the vocabulary.
Michelle Miller encourages us in “Minds Online: Teaching Effectively With Technology” to not really feel like instructors have to consider every and each factor {that a} pupil submits to considered one of our lessons. In my case, I have a tendency to watch each screencast video that’s submitted, or in any other case how would I ever be taught the names of every pupil’s pet? But I do watch the movies at double pace, and I’m in a position to get via them comparatively shortly. And I typically delegate some portion of the work to a educating assistant.
The most typical homework given to college students in most lessons is studying. To incentivize that, I sometimes assign studying workout routines and quizzes. First, I ask college students to submit analog or digital notes associated to what they learn. A standard format I take advantage of is a 5-3-1 construction: the place they establish 5 details that stood out to them, 3 ways they may apply what they learn and one query they’ve as a dialogue immediate for others who learn the identical passages. Second, I ceaselessly have fewer than ten auto-graded questions to take a look at for understanding of the assigned studying. Finally, I’ve round 5 reflection and software questions as a part of the studying quiz.
As for the criticism that college students ought to need to do studying or different pre-work purely from intrinsic motivation, I’ve this recommendation. In the guide “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” Daniel Pink notes that: “Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.” It’s value reflecting on methods we are able to let college students be extra self-directed to foster intrinsic motivation of their research.
When I spoke with James Lang for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, he shared the best way his pondering has advanced concerning motivation. He confused that the analysis reveals that:
“We need to have those intrinsic motivators, and a lot of school-based motivation is extrinsic in the form of grades and degrees and all that other stuff. We do need to pull up those intrinsic motivators in any way that you can. I have to say though, over the past few years, as I’ve continued to look at that research and think more and more about this question, I’ve come to believe that actually we need both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in order to be successful.”
Lang continued to describe how in endeavors reminiscent of train, ideally we might be intrinsically motivated, however individuals usually aren’t. Instead, they use social connections and exterior reminders of their achievements to bridge the hole between the actions (really going for the run) and the rewards (recognizing how nice it feels after we train). In this manner, the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations can spur one another on.
Another general advice on how to get college students to not require as a lot exterior motivation is to take into account the alternate options to conventional grades. In addition to Susan Blum’s ‘Ungrading,’ I like to recommend:
Grading for Growth: This assortment of posts through the Substack publication engine by Robert Talbert and David Clark explores the challenges with the methods we have a tendency to strategy grades in increased training and how to use various grading practices that concentrate on development.
Ungrading Twitter Thread: Curated by Jesse Stommel, this thread has the hyperlinks to a lot of Jesse’s writing and talking on the subject. Instead of adopting “best practices,” he implores us to undertake what he known as “necessary practices.”
How have I been in a position to sustain a 429-day streak of train? Partially, it’s as a result of I would like to stay longer and find a way to be extra current for these I like. The intrinsic components motivating me are sturdy over the lengthy haul and they construct upon each other. However, when it comes to the day by day self-discipline to maintain going, it does assist once I get these buzzes on my wrist through an Apple Watch, telling me that I can nonetheless obtain my health objectives for the day. When I take a look at the app that reviews out my streaks, but taunts me with what’s left to accomplish at present to maintain the momentum going, I wind up doing the factor I don’t really feel like doing within the second for the larger image rewards.
