When students feel motivated to learn (University of Buffalo, UW-Whitewater, Kennesaw State), we’re likely to see increases in effort, energy, curiosity, and creativity. We might notice they come to class more, are better prepared, and generally seem open to tackling challenging content or leading a group project. Sometimes, though, even the most motivated students can show a dip in their engagement after midterms, and everyone can use a pick me up to push through the second part of the semester. If you’ve noticed this happening in your classes, try these evidence-based practices to reenergize yourself and your students for the next part of the semester!  

Five Practices for Motivation

 1) Share your enthusiasm, research interests, and real-world experiences. Did you know that emotional contagion can impact your students? If you’re excited and happy about your courses and your content, you may be transferring your enjoyment and energy to your students.  

2) Pass the mic. Not sure you’re ready for Toastmasters, but need to share conceptual content in a lecture format? Explore ways to bring peer instruction to your course. Try having students sign up to summarize the day’s lecture at the start of the next class; have 3 students teach the same concept in small groups then compare notes; or try ConcepTests to identify common misunderstandings or difficulties. 

3) Launch a collaborative research study to meet a campus need, solve a community problem, or document a phenomenon. If students have gained some experience with the tools they’ll need to conduct research in the first half of your course, consider having them pair up in groups or as a whole class to apply their skills in a research setting. Brainstorm questions, collect and analyze data, interpret results, and share discoveries. Make it as formal (could this be a SoTL publication?) or informal as you’d like. Check out this short guide on undergraduate research from the American Fisheries Society. 

5) Give feedback that acknowledges student effort, honors their attempts, and offers them a path forward.  Not all assessments need qualitative feedback, but when it is provided, it can have a significant impact on student motivation and persistence. Students sometimes feel like they have to know everything when they start something new and sometimes our grading practices reinforce those beliefs.  Individualized feedback that emphasizes effort, improvement, and risk-taking, can be just the thing to reduce student worries and get them back on track.

Ready for a little experiment? Before you make any shifts in your instruction, choose an upcoming week to track student engagement. For a few days, document a student engagement score of 1-3 for each student (and yourself!) or a sample of students in a particular class. 3 means most engaged, 2 more engaged than not, and 1 not engaged. Once you collect your data, see if you can find any trends that stand out and then try to figure out if one of the practices above may address one of those trends. Similarly, if you find out that your students are highly engaged, tell us about it!

One exciting aspect of having an office across from classroom space is getting to hear the excited conversation, the laughter, and the hallway chatter following engaging classes. These types of learning experiences at USC Upstate impact students beyond the class period: students feel lower levels of stress, greater autonomy, greater abilities to self-regulate and achieve academic goals, more confidence to push further into content, take academic risks, and achieve a higher likelihood of completing what’s been asked of them (Baylor). So try out the project you put off until later, rework the final assessment to include more options, invite students to share their thinking and content explorations, and always be prepared to laugh out loud.