Motivation Matters

I have this little trick I do to keep track of things I find on social media, the internet, etc., but don’t have time to really read. I copy the link and email it to myself. It works like a charm because when I sit down to check my emails, I can see the topics and articles and make time to really digest them.

I recently came across this article from 2018 making the rounds on social. I left it in my inbox because it has fascinated me. I usually I read an article, decide if it is worthy of a repost on our ERG social accounts and if so, I pass it on to Kaitlyn who dutifully post things that I cannot keep track of. It’s a very basic screening process but somehow it works.  

This particular link has been sitting in my inbox because it’s taking me a while to get my head wrapped around it.

It caught my eye because I am always looking for things to share that are useful not only to educators, but also to parents. In a time of virtual learning, I thought this was especially interesting. Upon rereading, I felt the need to reread. And then reread again.

The gist of the article (you can listen if you don’t have time to read it) is that researchers were trying to measure attention, but found out they really were capturing motivation. Two different things. So, the tests they were giving people were not indicating the actual learning or the actual attention of the student, but the motivation of the participants. And this led to the researchers wondering about how to increase motivation – which it turns out is autonomy – but let’s start with the first part…

Instead of the data showing who was skilled at what, they found out who was motivated.

This has huge ramifications for those of us in the classroom, coaches, parents, or just human beings who work with people. A couple of thoughts:

1. This is intuitive right? If you’ve ever taught a lesson, coached a child, or basically taught anyone to do anything in your whole life, that should resonate with you. We can all think of someone we know for sure has demonstrated skills, thinking, and/or learning, but when it comes time to perform, they don’t always show it. And you could wring their neck because you know they know it. I can think of a few (or a million) students who had poor test scores, and when I talked to them about it, they told me they just “didn’t try” and or “didn’t care.”  Motivation.
2. The researchers mention testing and how controlling we have become in education. This aligns with my observation that an unintended consequence of large scale and ridiculously frequent testing is that we are creating unmotivated students which leads to lower test scores. The thing we are trying to fix is the thing we are causing. What if all the data really shows is who was motivated? 
3. The iron is hot to strike against large scale, mandated testing. The glimpse of teaching and learning that parents were privy to during our stay at home days was unprecedented. I would bet that motivation of their own children was a huge variable in how the work went, what was completed, etc. On most if not all days, they would tell you that motivation factored into what their child was able to do – not necessarily what they know. I will go further and speculate that parents (myself included) would not want to be judged or evaluated based on those low motivation moments, and if we did test, the scores would not only be bad, but also invalid. 

Our legislators realized the scores from this school year would be invalid, so they excused everyone from testing. I make a motion that we continue this trend based on the fact that we can. We can stop this because we started this. 

Testing is not only time consuming, problematic, and has unintended consequences, but it is also expensive. There are much more valuable and useful ways to figure out what students know, and we can use that for actual instruction. There are also much more important and useful ways to allocate funding.  

Now is the time to end the focus on testing once and for all and replace it with a focus on actual student learning. For anyone who tells you otherwise, check their motivation.