Increasing students’ motivation in higher education by designing a specific curriculum has always been a challenging but very complex process. The Department of Business, Finance and Marketing (BFM) of The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) initiated a redesign of the curricula with the major goals of increasing flexibility of learning opportunities and offering students a more motivating, inspiring and richer diversity of learning experiences. In the literature of learning in higher education this has often been labeled as ‘offering extracurricular learning opportunities’. The redesign of the curriculum implies that the new one will result in an enhancement of the flexibility of the curriculum, by offering learning opportunities beyond the borders of specific programs like marketing, finance or entrepreneurship and retail management. The richness and diversity should create flexible platforms, offering students the possibility to enrich their career choices to design their own personalised career path, hopefully maximizing the possibilities for their talent development. However, very little is known about the relationship between the students’ satisfaction with extracurricular learning opportunities, aiming at the personalisation of students’ career choices, and their motivation. In this chapter we describe our research into this relationship between student motivation and learning environments. Designing a network curriculum by increasing the possibility of extracurricular learning opportunities in higher education could have a positive impact on students’ motivation when it is combined with activities to increase goal students’ commitment. This depends on teachers’ qualities to communicate the valence and instrumentality of the learning possibilities offered for the prospective work environment. This is a complex issue however. Teachers from different educational programs, even in the same domain, have a different orientation on existing learning opportunities within one specific program. Excellent coaching skills by tutors are important. These coaching skills are necessary to support students in the process of envisioning extracurricular learning opportunities when important career choices have to be made.
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Professionals such as gerontologists play an important role in thedesign, development and implementation of age-friendly services.and products, by using working methods and principles of co-creation.A Dutch undergraduate applied gerontology programme aims totrain students in the why, how and what of co-creation. The degreeto which students are intrinsically motivated to develop competenciesdepends on how their psychological needs are met. Theseneeds are autonomy, an awareness of competence and a sense ofrelatedness, as described in the self-determination theory. To nurturethe intrinsic motivation of the applied gerontology students, arealistic, powerful learning environment called the Living LabApplied Gerontology was designed and implemented. The aim ofthis paper is to present the design of this powerful learning environmentand to discuss its value for nurturing the students’ intrinsicmotivation for co-creation. Based on a focus group with eightstudents, we identify directions for further research and developmentof living labs.
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Demographic changes, such as the ageing of society and the decline of the birth rate, are gradually leading to the loss of valuable knowledge and experience in the Dutch Labour market. This necessitates an explicit focus on workers' sustainable employment so that they can add value to the organisation throughout their career. This study looks into the way in which the workers' motivation might affect their investments into their own sustainable employment. It was conducted in a major industrial service provider, Sitech Services. The conclusion is that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in both younger and older employees, and that the younger workers undertake more action in order to give physical form to their sustainable employment than their older colleagues.
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In reaction to the lack of intrinsic motivation of construction site workers, to wear their safety helmets at all times, a series of research projects studied causes and possible solutions. Goal is to gain an inspirational discussion to get the design onto the next level. This paper describes a study presented on a conference poster (Persuasive 2014, 21-23 May, 2014, Padua, Italy) which shows how persuasive technologies are implemented in product design, such as using motivational theories and smart systems
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In the Southern part of Norway, many secondary school pupils drop out due to lack of motivation. Our project aims to enhance pupils’ desire to learn and to complete their education. Here, we investigate possible change in motivation after implementation of an intervention. We specifically focus on pupils’ motivation for their subject, in this study: Norwegian. Meta-cognitive abilities and self-regulated learning have a positive effect on motivation. Therefore, we developed a five-step intervention to strengthen pupils’ self-regulated learning and meta-cognitive abilities. In the intervention, pupils define a) what prevents them from being motivated for learning and b) how they can overcome possible obstacles hindering their learning. Additionally, they discuss this with their peers and formulate their own learning approach to the subject at hand, thus strengthening their sense of autonomy and relatedness. Pupils’ motivation was measured at three time points across the school year (N=101, T1; N=76, T2; N=105, T3). MANOVA revealed that, over the course of the year, pupils became less intrinsically and more extrinsically motivated towards their subject, thus contradicting our expectations and previous findings. Although we aimed to target pupils’ intrinsic motivation, the implementation of our study may also have reduced pupils’ sense of autonomy, thus strengthening their external motivation and moving away from more student-centered learning.
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Abstract The main purpose of this intervention was to measure student’s motivation in English Literature before and after an intervention based Zoltán Dörnyei’s Motivational Self System (2009) and Michael Magid’s (2011) application of the same theory in schools in Singapore. The present intervention was adapted to the students of the Dutch secondary school CLV (Christian Lyceum Veenendaal) in Veenendaal using fragments of English Literature (books, films, poems and songs). The intervention was carried out during eight lessons of fifty minutes where students had to participate in a variety of activities, all registered in a workbook assigned to each student at the beginning of the research project. Prior to and after the intervention, students filled in a questionnaire on motivation and English Literature. The results of these questionnaires were analysed with SPSS running descriptive statistical analysis. Along with these analyses, the timelines and life trees made by the students during the lessons and students’ answers given to the exercises on the workbooks were evaluated and compared. One of the most important conclusions of the intervention was that female students were more motivated, could make action plans and set goals easier and more detailed than male students. Another important result was that students in general had no interest in English Literature, although they realised it can be influential in their future life. The affective attitude of students to- wards the teacher and materials increased after the intervention, as well as students’ confidence in their own effort during class. However, the construct validity between the quantitative and qualitative data could not be established due to the fact that gender was not included as variable in the questionnaire. Gender relevancy became visible after the analyses of the workbooks. Therefore, future research will have to focus on including gender as a variable in the questionnaire in order to establish solid relations between quantitative and qualitative data. Another interesting research question for future interventions could be how to adapt English Literature and the materials that are being used in a way that both female and male students can tap into their own intrinsic motivational current.
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Grounded in self-determination theory, the present study examines the explanatory role of students' perceived need satisfaction and need frustration in the relationship between performance grading (versus non-grading) and students' motivation and fear in a real-life educational physical education setting. Grading consisted of teacher judgments of students' performances through observations, based on pre-defined assessment criteria. Thirty-one classes with 409 students (Mage = 14.7) from twenty-seven Flemish (Belgian) secondary schools completed questionnaires measuring students' perceived motivation, fear and psychological need satisfaction and frustration, after two lessons: one with and one without performance grading. After lessons including performance grading, students reported less intrinsic motivation and identified regulation, and more external regulation, amotivation and fear. As expected, less need satisfaction accounted for (i.e., mediated) the relationship between performance grading and self-determined motivational outcomes. Need frustration explained the relationship between performance grading and intrinsic motivation, as well as less self-determined motivational outcomes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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A promising contribution of Learning Analytics is the presentation of a learner's own learning behaviour and achievements via dashboards, often in comparison to peers, with the goal of improving self-regulated learning. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the impact of these dashboards and few designs are informed by theory. Many dashboard designs struggle to translate awareness of learning processes into actual self-regulated learning. In this study we investigate a Learning Analytics dashboard based on existing evidence on social comparison to support motivation, metacognition and academic achievement. Motivation plays a key role in whether learners will engage in self-regulated learning in the first place. Social comparison can be a significant driver in increasing motivation. We performed two randomised controlled interventions in different higher-education courses, one of which took place online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were shown their current and predicted performance in a course alongside that of peers with similar goal grades. The sample of peers was selected in a way to elicit slight upward comparison. We found that the dashboard successfully promotes extrinsic motivation and leads to higher academic achievement, indicating an effect of dashboard exposure on learning behaviour, despite an absence of effects on metacognition. These results provide evidence that carefully designed social comparison, rooted in theory and empirical evidence, can be used to boost motivation and performance. Our dashboard is a successful example of how social comparison can be implemented in Learning Analytics Dashboards.
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Supervision meetings give teachers and students opportunities to interact with each other and to co-regulate students’ learning processes. Co-regulation refers to the transitional process of a student who is becoming a self-regulated learner by interacting with a more capable other such as a teacher. During a task, teachers are expected to pull back their support and give opportunities to students to take responsibility. This study aims to explore the shifting patterns of co-regulation, feedback perception, and motivation during a 5-month research project. Participants were 20 students conducting research in pairs and six teachers who supervised these students. Two videotaped supervision meetings at the beginning and end of the research process and questionnaires on feedback perception and motivation were analysed. Results on co-regulation showed a constant and comparable level of regulation at the start and at the end of students’ research projects. Feedback perception did not change, but motivation decreased significantly.
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