Month: January 2017

Motivation means business

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Heads up: this video is all about businesses, financial rewards and success, mixed in with some really great thoughts on motivation that can easily be applied into teaching practice.

Dan Pink’s TED talk spoke of the importance of intrinsic motivation in the workplace: the more motivated workers were to do their jobs well, the better they worked. Now I’m not relating school to a workplace, but they often share similar characteristics. Many big businesses offer financial bonuses for good performance. Students are offered monetary scholarships for good performance. At the non-monetary level, students can be offered treats, gold stars, or even material goods. What Pink shares in his video is that research says time and time again that the extrinsic motivator system prevalent in the workplace is not conducive to better work practice. I believe that this can be extended down to the school level, where intrinsic motivation should always be fostered.

Intrinsic motivation is another self-regulation skill that is imperative for student success. Pink states that there are three main parts to fostering intrinsic motivation in the workplace: autonomy, mastery and purpose. These three elements are also essential to a student’s education. Students who have choice in their learning and assessment are more engaged; they have ownership over their education because it is for them and they are creating it. When students are held accountable for their learning, their intrinsic motivation will drive them to succeed rather than that coveted gold star. Mastery is equally as important as it allows students to fully gain a new skill or acquire new knowledge – they have not memorized another fact for a test that can be forgotten the day later. If students feel they have mastered a topic, they have achieved a higher self-efficacy which can lead to higher performance. Finally, intrinsic motivation is hard to develop if one does not have a purpose. Students need to be told why they are learning each topic, what they can do with these skills and knowledge, and how they can apply this in the present and future. Students who have a purpose feel more connected to those in the classroom and are more interested in success for the sake of success, not the gold star they have been trained to want.

I hope to foster intrinsic motivation in my students by making the curriculum relevant to their interests, giving students some autonomy in how they learn and the assignments they complete, and by investing students in the purpose of my classroom – to use new knowledge and skills to continually create a better world. I plan on monitoring student motivation through self-reflections throughout my practicum, to see if their motivations change based on topics, activities, and/or assignments. I know that it’s idealistic to be able to do all of these things in only a few weeks, but I hope that I can foster intrinsic motivation in my students for them to carry forward in their future and apply to the aspect of their life that is their passion.

Pink, D. (2009, Jul). Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation. Retrieved 9 Jan 2017 from https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation

Retroactive: Living Inquiry

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After a few weeks of researching, pondering and planning, I was able to share my inquiry with my classmates and faculty at a Living Inquiry Session. Below is the poster that I created to share with my peers to highlight the key points of my inquiry.

 

Feedback on my inquiry:

The feedback I received was mostly positive. Everyone thought that this was an important topic to research as many of my peers had similar experiences of not learning these skills in their education. One of the main weaknesses that arose was that my inquiry was very research focused – I had turned my research mind on rather than my inquiring mind. I knew that due to ethical considerations, I cannot collect any data to analyze, but that is something I am very interested in pursuing. This experience has made me realize that educational research is going to be in my future as I am really passionate about it!

Relating to my actual inquiry, the main feedback I received was on how I could implement reflections. The Science Reflection Journals that I had read about in the literature were great at guiding students on what to reflect, but limited choice as they were formatted as single “fill in the blank” worksheets. The evaluator suggested that I give the option of online reflections such as blogs or visual journals. They also suggested that I show my students primary source examples of field journals to show students that scientists also reflect on their process of learning, discovery and growth.

The evaluator also suggested that I introduce online resources for students to use as study strategies. They suggest apps like ShowMe and Paper 53, both which give students the ability to create their own space for showing their knowledge. I would need to look into the apps more, but I was excited to learn about resources for students.

I wanted feedback on how I should implement these skills into the classroom. I had three main ideas: in a lecture, in assignments, or as workshops. The feedback from my peers supported the first two ideas as I have limited time with the students, and long term incorporation will help students understand these strategies more and will hopefully turn them into habit for the students. In my unit and lesson plans, I hope to incorporate these skills in as many classes as possible, without overwhelming the students with study strategies. I don’t want students to feel that the purpose of these is that we are working towards a test; I want to teach them that by incorporating these strategies into our routine, we can focus more on meaningful learning that will prepare them better for a test later!

Retroactive: Self-regulated learning skills and problem solving

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One part of my inquiry is about how to implement self-regulated learning skills and study strategies into my inquiry. Prior to research, I decided that there are three possible ways: a lecture on the skills, incorporating the skills into assignments, and as supportive workshops throughout a year. I am most curious about incorporating skills as assignments as I believe that you learn by doing, and what better way to learn skills than incorporate them into the curriculum. While I could not find any research that talked about the benefits of this method, Zepeda and Richey’s research outlined below is representative of incorporating skills into work in the sciences.

The research: 

The authors investigated how an intervention to teach the self-regulated learning skills of planning, monitoring and evaluation to middle school science students would affect student metacognition, motivation, and learning. The intervention design was such that the experimental group received individual packages that taught them self-regulation skills in addition to physics practice problems, whereas the control only received physics practice problems. Both groups were given many packages over the course of the year, and without instruction from their teacher were asked to answer the problems to the best of their abilities. The results of the study found that students who participated in the experimental group reported an increased student declarative knowledge of metacognition, an increase in self-efficacy, and higher achievement in practice problems and further application of metacognitive skills.

What this means for my inquiry? 

The results of this study are counter-intuitive: those with more practice did worse than those who had less practice. This only feeds my inquiry – teach students to study better, not harder. I don’t believe that practice makes perfect, but that efficient practice does. The students who reflected on their work, engaging their metacognition and employing their learned self-regulated skills, saw increases not only in academic achievement but also in self-efficacy.

As for implementation, I am now looking to incorporate planning, monitoring and evaluation into assignments to encourage these behaviors. In order for this to be effective, I need to teach students how to plan, monitor and evaluate their work in class to ensure that students understand what they are doing and why it is beneficial. I would like to incorporate this into practice problems as formative assessment, or even learning activities where students are practicing new skills with their peers in class.

Reference:

Zepeda, C. D., & Richey, J. E. (2015). Direct instruction of metacognition benefits adolescent science learning, transfer, and motivation: An in vivo study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(4), 954-970.

 

Retroactive: Science Reflection Journals

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A large component of self-regulated learning is self-awareness in one’s strengths, weaknesses, and plans. While trying to find ways to encourage self-regulated behaviors that were easily monitorable, I stumbled across a research paper: The Effect of Reflective Science Journal Writing on Students’ Self-Regulated Learning Strategies by N. Al-Rawahi and S. Al-Balushi.

The research: 

Their study found that students who wrote in science reflective journals showed a significant increase in self-regulation strategy use compared to a control group. Al-Rawahi and Al-Balushi used a template journal (see figure 1, pg. 372 for their template). The template consisted of six areas: my lesson objectives, my observations, my dialogue with others, my main conclusions from this lesson, at the end of this lesson I feel that, and my evaluation. Each section had sentence prompts for students to complete, but then gave ample additional room for students to add more. They focused heavily on monitoring and evaluating understanding of content, an important part of self-regulated learning. The limitations to using such a template is that students are only going to write exactly what they are asked about. It does not allow for students to explore other thoughts and feelings that they may have outside the context of the content and classroom, which could have an impact on their learning.

What this means for my inquiry:

I am eager to use reflective journals as a means of increasing self-regulation skills and self-efficacy, but I would not follow the same template that was outlined in the paper. I want my students to be able to express themselves however they feel is best – writing in a journal, on a blog, audio recordings, etc. I would use similar prompts outlined in the article, but I may add more specific prompts so I can assess their development of these skills over time. I would also not have students fill this out after every class, but at least twice a week. Students are welcome and encouraged to write more frewuently, but I would not impose it on the students as I know that they are already very busy and this may be a hard sell for a lot of the students. I would “mark” the journals for completeness and thoroughness, and give them completion marks. Hopefully this extrinsic motivator will initially get the ball rolling so that intrinsic motivation will take over once students see the benefits.

Reference:

Al-Rawahi, N. M., & Al-Balushi, S. M. (2015) The Effect of Reflective Science Journal Writing on Students’ Self-Regulated Learning Strategies. International Journal of Environmental And Science Education, 10(3), 367-379.

Retroactive: Self-efficacy and academic achievement

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Prior to looking at self-regulated learning skills and study strategies, I wanted to determine if my inquiry should contain a connection to self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to complete a task, understand concepts, and overall succeed in a particular area. I was interested in the self-efficacy of students and if a relationship existed between self-efficacy and academic achievement. Based on prior research, I believed that if students had a higher self-efficacy, they would have a higher academic achievement. This being said though, all of my previous research had been done at a post-secondary level. Did the age and development difference between earlier adolescence and later adolescence cause a significant enough change that self-efficacy would no longer correlated to achievement? Hwang and colleagues research answered just my questions!

The research:

The authors investigated the relationship between self-efficacy and academic achievement in a 5 year longitudinal study of Korean high school students from grade 8 to grade 12. The main finding in the study was that a reciprocal causal relationship between self-efficacy an academic achievement from grade 8 to 12 existed. This means that past academic performance predicts self-efficacy positively, and that self-efficacy beliefs positively predict future academic achievement. Both findings support previous research which were executed at a post-secondary level. The effect of past academic achievement on self-efficacy beliefs was higher than that of self-efficacy beliefs on academic achievement. This indicates that past performance will determine a student’s self-efficacy, which can influence their future academic performance. Educators should encourage students with past high achievement to reflect on their practices to promote their self-efficacy. Educators should also encourage students with low academic performance to reflect as well but in a manner to not cause the student to feel defeated. Students should be able to identify moments of strengths and areas to improve. Intervention should target self-efficacy as well as academic achievement rather than one aspect as they are mutually reinforcing.

What does this mean for my inquiry?

My inquiry is about how to implement self-regulated learning and study strategies and their effects on self-efficacy. A factor in why I chose this inquiry is that I want students to study better, not harder, to have higher achievement. This research suggests that in addition to fostering self-regulated learning skills and study strategies, I should also be fostering student self-efficacy. The authors suggestions for fostering self-efficacy are through reflection by focusing on strengths, weaknesses and ways to improve. Reflections such as these are an important self-regulated learning skill that I want to implement into my classroom.

Reference:

Hwang, M. H., Choi, H. C., Lee, A., Culver, J. D., & Hutchison, B. (2016). The relationship between self-efficacy and academic achievement: A 5-year panel analysis. The Asia-Pacific Education Researc
her, 25(1), 89-98.