An important yet perhaps overlooked factor in decreasing motivation amongst students may be school environments that provide students with fewer opportunities for choice and decision making. Giving students’ choice actually promotes motivation and learning within the classroom. However, choice often plays a minimal role in students learning experiences because teachers are unsure of how to effectively incorporate choice into the classroom and therefore they forego choice altogether. Teachers also fear that offering students’ choice will reduce productively or lead to off-task behaviour. When choice is offered to students, it is typically seen in the areas of project topics, assessment, and social arrangements such as seating and classroom procedures. According to research, choice should be relevant and meaningful, competence-enhancing, and should be provided in just the right amount.
First, research on student choice and motivation suggests that its not the act of choosing that increases motivation, but it’s the extent to which the available choices relate to the students personal values and goals that increase motivation. A sense of choice must be relevant and meaningful to the chooser. As educators it’s important to give student access to meaningful choice by providing options that are culturally relevant, age-relevant, and personalized. It’s important for teachers to provide a variety of options that can appeal to a range of students because all students are different. As well, teachers can be most supportive of students’ autonomy by demonstrating and explaining the relevance of tasks to the personal interests and goals of their students.
Secondly, choice should be competence-enhancing. In this case, the various options provided to students should provide an optimal challenge. Research finds that students are most motivated by tasks that are at an intermediate level of difficulty and that choices that are too easy can lead to boredom and frustration if too difficult. Overall, providing a sense of choice that is within the students’ zone of proximal development is the most beneficial. Teachers should provide challenging choices by matching the difficulty of the task to their students’ knowledge, skills, and perceived competence in the area in which the choice is offered.
Finally, choice should be provided in just the right amount. When too many choices are given, students may feel overwhelmed and motivation and engagement will decrease. When there are too many choices offered, students are no longer motivated by the availability of options to chose from and instead feel burdened by the task of choosing. It all depends on the student as some may feel overwhelmed by having too many different choices to choose from whereas others may value having many options to choose from. In order to account for this, teachers should try to have a restricted set of options and sufficient time for students to choose among them.
Overall, choice provides a critical role in increasing students’ intrinsic motivation for learning. Although some teachers may feel unsure of how to bring a sense of choice to students within the classroom, it’s important that teachers do make an effort because the result will be an engaged and motivated classroom full of students. What teacher doesn’t want to see that?
Evans, M & Boucher, A. R. (2015). Optimizing the power of choice: supporting student autonomy to foster motivation and engagement in learning. Mind, Brain, and Education, 9(2), 87-91.